Stewart Brand's Blog, page 10

“Lockdown Gardening” Is The New Archaeological Frontier in Britain

Few things inspire someone to take a longer view on history than the possibility of treasure in their own backyard. With people taking to their gardens under pandemic lockdown came more than 47,000 reported archaeological finds in England and Wales.

Meanwhile, the British government just announced their plans to broaden what counts as “treasure” under law, expanding the definition to include items such as Bronze Age axes, Iron Age caldrons, and medieval weapons and jewelry. Their goal: to keep priceless history out of private collections.

But giving museums dibs on historical artifacts does not seem to diminish their market value or the appeal to landowners and prospectors. The Earth’s surface, now a layered document of not just prehistoric but modern human activity continues to reveal its secrets under the combined exfoliating power of human curiosity and opportunism. “Lockdown gardening” and the varied other forms of digging done by idle hands in 02020 contribute to the Golden Age of archaeology and paleontology we live through as a consequence of rapid global development and our sheer busybodyness:

In 2017, 1,267 pieces went through the process in which a [UK] committee determines whether an item should be considered a treasure, up from 79 pieces in 1997.

Podcast: The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure | Nadia Eghbal

The Long Now Foundation · Nadia Eghbal – The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure

Nadia Eghbal is particularly interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the internet – and how the dynamics of these subjects play out in software, online communities and generally living life online.

Eghbal, who interviewed hundreds of developers while working to improve their experience at GitHub, argues that modern open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators. Her new book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, is about open source developers and what they tell us about the evolution of our online social spaces.

Eghbal sees open source code as a form of public infrastructure that requires maintenance, and that offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators on all platforms.

Listen on Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify.

The Vocabulary of Long-term Thinking

Using Google Ngram, Fisher found that the use of the phrase “long-term” has declined since the 01990s.

When we talk “long,” how long do we mean? Multiple horizons all compete for real estate in one word. MIT Knight Science Journalism Fellow Richard Fisher doesn’t mind, though, seeing opportunity in language’s affordances and flexibility to play, explore, unpack: his Substack newsletter, The Long-termist’s Field Guide, just introduced “Long-terminology,” a fun recursive tour of vocabulary words that offer handles with which one can grapple big ideas and their attendant practices and cultures.

His entry on word “long” and its different radii explores the sentiment and scope of Long Now but also Longue Durée, Long Time, and Longtermism (Oxford style). Inviting readers to contribute to a crowdsourced glossary, he celebrates the pluralism of both language in its ever-folding dynamism and the very varied human sense of time. As far as guided tours go, this one’s off to a good start.

Learn More



Subscribe to Fisher’s newsletter on long-term thinking, “The Long-termist’s Field Guide.”Read Richard Fisher’s essay in the MIT Technology Review, “Humanity is stuck in short-term thinking. Here’s how we escape.”Read Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose’s essay in BBC Future that Fisher edited, “How to build something that lasts 10,000 years.”

What was the biggest empire in history?

What was the biggest empire in history? The answer, writes Benjamin Plackett in Live Science, depends on whether you think in terms of fraction of living humans or number of living humans, revealing the challenges inherent in attempting to compare time periods:

That’s without getting into the pros and cons of the other ways to measure size: largest land mass; largest contiguous land mass; largest army; largest gross domestic product; and so on.

But one alternative would be counted in years: we should measure empires by their long-term influence and stability, according to Martin Bommas, Director of the Macquarie University History Museum in Sydney:

“I think that to be classed as an empire, you need to have a period of peace to bring prosperity,” Bommas added. “If you look at it through years lasted, the Romans won this competition hands down.”

A Timely Reflection on our Changing Climate

Antarctic Sea Ice Melt — 02019 (Source: Maxar)

The Ancient Greeks had two different words fortime. The first, chronos, is time as we think of it now: marching forward, ceaselessly creating our past, present, and future. The second, kairos, is time in the opportune sense: the ideal moment to act, as captured by the phrase, “It’s time.”

My work, like many other photographers, has been a dedicated search forkairos — finding that ideal confluence of place and time that helps to tell a particular story. For me, that story has focused on the manmade world. In 02013, I launched Daily Overview, which features compositions created from satellite imagery focused on the places on the planet where humans have left their mark. Partnerships with some of the world’s best satellite imaging companies gave me access to libraries from which I could compose a visual compendium of the world we are creating. It’s a world that we are harvesting, mining, exploring, and powering. And it’s a world that we are changing faster than ever before.

Left: Mount Whaleback Iron Ore Mine in Australia. Center: Development in Boca Raton, Florida. Right: Singapore Tankers (Source: Maxar)

The atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul J. Crutzen coined the term Anthropocene to describe this new geological era, one in which a single species — human beings — is the most powerful force affecting the planet’s natural systems. My work to date has captured macro-view moments in this era so that we might get a better understanding of what we, collectively — with all of the good and all of the bad — have done.

Thousands of image installments on Daily Overview over the past six years have covered a lot of ground. But in some ways, our earlier work does not include a crucial element — chronos — needed to convey the severity of what we face in this new Anthropocentric era. A single picture reflects the story of a moment in time. With two or more pictures of that same place, you can tell a richer story about change: its breadth, its pace, its cause. That is the idea behind our newest project, Overview Timelapse. What might we learn when we combine chronos, kairos, and this awe-inspiring perspective from above?

Las Vegas Expansion — 01989 / 02019 (Source: ESA)

The story of the current moment is that far-reaching human activity on the planet, primarily the continued burning of fossil fuels, is releasing a vast and unprecedented amount of carbon that is, in turn, causing a drastic (and widely-predicted) reaction by the planet’s natural systems. By looking for the locations that convey the magnitude of what is taking place, my co-author Timothy Dougherty and I spent hundreds of hours of seeking out and observing change that has taken place on the macroscale — and the reaction from the climate that we have already begun to see as a result.

Amazon Rainforest Deforestation — 01989 / 02019 (Source: ESA)

As I write this, smoke from a nearby wildfire is obscuring the sun outside of my window. Perhaps I’m not as surprised as I should be to see that my home state of California has burned at an extraordinary rate this summer. Or that there were five tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean last month for only the second time on record. Or the horrible destruction and loss of wildlife from the Australian Bushfires earlier this year. Or the once-in-a-thousand-year floods and Derechos in the Midwest. Or the recent reports of faster-than-predicted melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Miami Beach Red Tide — May 02017 / June 02018 (Source: Nearmap)

What scares me most now is what this project has taught me about how all of these interconnected events can cascade. These conditions build upon on one another such that something like unprecedented heat leads to drought, which leads to conditions ripe for fires, which leads to fires, which destroys trees, which returns all of the carbon stored in those trees since the Industrial Revolution into the atmosphere, which leads to more unprecedented heat, and so on, and so on, and so on.

Westmont Rooftop Solar Project — 02014 / 02017 (Source: Nearmap)

Despite all this, I still maintain a healthy dose of optimism for what lies ahead. I have witnessed a changing climate and all the destruction it brings to bear, but I have also seen solutions which can make for a safer, better civilization and world. Throughout Overview Timelapse we have featured some of these innovations that are slated to bring positive change in the coming years.

Great Green Wall of Africa — 02018 / 02019 (Source: Maxar)

So what will come next for a human species trying to thrive on a rapidly warming planet? The only certain constant is change. Looking to the future, it is in our hands, collectively, to determine the nature of the change to come. Let us work together to build awareness of the well-researched and considered solutions that already exist. Ones that get us excited about what lies ahead, not paralyzed by the magnitude of the problem. Ones that can be scaled to meet the severity of the challenge of an increasingly carbon-rich atmosphere.

Perhaps we will soon come to an overdue, yet opportune moment — our kairos — to reverse the course of human-induced planetary warming, and change the Earth for the better.

It’s time.

Learn More



Watch Benjamin Grant’s 02018 Long Now Seminar, Overview: Earth and Civilization in the Macroscope.Read our 02018 feature on Grant’s Daily Overview project and images of Earth from space, “Seeing the Whole Earth From Space Changed Everything.”Watch  ANTHROPOCENE , the 02019 documentary by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky, and Nicholas de Pencier that was screened at Long Now as part of its U.S. premiere.

Scenario Planning for the Long-term

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

The Role of Mental Maps

This is a map of North America. It was made by a Dutch map maker by the name of Herman Moll, working in London in 01701. I bought it on Portobello Road for about 60 pounds back in 01981. Which is to say, it’s not a particularly valuable map. But there is something unusual about it: California is depicted as an island. 

What’s interesting to me as a scenario planner is how the map came to be, how it was used, and how it was changed.

The Spanish came up from the South, and they found what we now call Mexico, and the tip of the Baja Peninsula, and sailed up into the Sea of Cortez. Those who went further north along the West Coast eventually came to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, a channel separating present-day Washington and British Columbia. Assuming the two bodies of water were connected, they created the Island of California. 

Now, this would only be a historical curiosity were it not for the problem of the missionaries who actually used the map to go inland. And of course, they would have to take their boats with them to cross the Sea of California. And when they went over the Sierra Nevada Mountains down the other side, they found this beach that went on and on and on and on until finally they realized there was no Sea of California.

And they went back to the map makers in Spain and said, “Your bloody map is wrong!” And the map makers fought back and said, “No, no, no, you’re in the wrong place, the map is right.” Anybody who works in a large organization understands this logic very well. Because the map is always right. 

The first maps depicting California as an island were drawn in 01605. In 01685, the King of Spain finally figured out that this was wrong and ordered the maps in Spain to be corrected. But we still have maps dating from 01765 that were drawn this way.

So what’s the message? If you get your facts wrong, you get your map wrong. If you get your map wrong, you do the wrong thing. But worst of all, once you believe a map, it’s very hard to change. 

We make our decisions about the future based on our own mental maps about how the world works. And we are very much prisoners of those mental maps. Part of the function of scenario planning is figuring out how to break out of the constraints. How do we challenge those mental maps that we see about how people behave, how organizations work and how institutions evolve?

The Importance of Diversity in Scenario-Planning 

This is the slide that IBM used to make a decision about the future of personal computers. It is the costliest slide in business history. This is a $200 billion slide.

In 01980, IBM made the above forecast of what they believed the demand of personal computers would be to decide whether or not they should get into the business. They projected that the total computers sold through all channels, over five years, would be 241,683, peaking in 01983 and heading south. After all, why would anyone buy a second computer?

This product [the personal computer] was so funky that the theory was that pursuing it was going to kill Apple. That was the goal: get people back to real computers [large mainframes] because real men use big machines. It was nine men in the room making this call, and they got it totally wrong. The correct answer was 25 million units sold over that five year period. 

So, they were a little bit off and they said, “Okay, 241,000 units, a couple thousand dollars a unit. Well, it’s not worth developing a chip. Intel, give us the chip. And there’s this kid from Seattle, Gates or something, who has got an Operating System called QDOS. He’ll give it to us for free, we’ll put it on the machine, we’ll put it in a box, we’ll call it an IBM computer.”

This was the moment they almost lost the future of the company, because they could not imagine that the world could be so different, that people would like a box with 16K of memory in it. That just seemed inconceivable to these nine men, who were the smartest people in their industry, who knew everything about what they were doing and yet still got it completely wrong. And it literally almost killed IBM as a result. And of course, they no longer make PCs because they could no longer compete, et cetera. This slide is why Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world. If IBM had said, “You know, maybe there really is a future here, and we’ll develop our own operating system and our own chips,” it might’ve been a very different story.

So, again, part of our challenge today in our thinking is precisely how we challenge each other’s mental maps. And for that, you need diversity. Diversity is the single most important characteristic for thinking about the future. Every time I have been wrong, with no exceptions, it’s because we had inadequate diversity in the room. There are a number of embarrassing moments in the history of the Global Business Network (GBN), the Mexico meeting being maybe the lowest point. Two weeks before the collapse of the Mexican peso, we said there were three scenarios for Mexico: a good scenario, a better scenario, and a best scenario. Two weeks later, it all went in the tank. Why? Because we were all just talking to ourselves, and as a result, we got it completely wrong.

So, one of the most important messages about long-term thinking is the inclusion of diverse points of view. And if you’re trapped in one mindset, you’re going to miss an enormous amount. 

The Spirit of Surprise

“Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events, and in today already walks tomorrow.”

Friedrich Schiller (01759-01805)

The future is being born. We all remember the Bill Gibson quote: “The future’s already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” The signals are out there.

And why diversity matters so much is because it enables you to pick up on a variety of signals from a variety of different disciplines, contexts, cultures, et cetera. And that’s an important part of what scenario thinking is about.

Scenario planning is rooted in the concept of Multiple Possibilities

The way most organizations have thought about the future is to project out from the present. And then, if they were concerned about uncertainty, they shaded it up and down a little bit, 10% up 10% down in what was called sensitivity analysis. It didn’t require much imagination; it required math. 

But scenario planning involves imagining different possibilities and then figuring out how we can get from here to there. It requires a combination of two things: imagination and analytic realism. If it’s just forecasts, just analysis, it’s pedestrian. You miss the big surprises. You don’t see that new mental map. If it’s just imagination without analysis and rigor behind it, it is just that; it’s good fiction.

So, it’s important that both of these come to bear in the task of thinking about scenarios. 

The Test of a Good Scenario

Scenario planning is not about prediction; it’s about making better decisions. That is, if you really do your homework well in multiple scenarios, you’re probably going to see this future. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is: what do you do? And if your scenarios are brilliant and nobody pays any attention to them, you have failed. Having been a consultant for many years, it was not a way to get more business to say to a CEO, “Well, we gave you the future and you blew it. You didn’t make the right decision.” That was our failure as consultants. Our job was to actually affect the mindset of decision makers. 

In the end, what we want to do with the Organizational Continuity Project is not simply understand long-term institutions, but influence them. How do we actually make better decisions about our societies, our governments, our corporations, our educational institutions, our communities? How do we actually think long-term and make better choices? That’s the real goal here. It’s beginning to think long-term about what is likely to happen. 

The Strategic Conversation and Strategic Options

It’s about a strategic conversation. What we want to empower is thinking about different scenarios, going out subsequently, creating new knowledge, doing research, doing serious homework, beginning to think about how you create what we call emergent strategies—strategies that emerge out of that conversation, as opposed to top-down control. And then testing those emergent strategies against what we’re already doing, and thereby improving the quality of decision-making.

So what this is really about is an orchestrated strategic conversation, with inputs from a variety of different sources, thinking about possible scenarios, thinking about how we might influence the shape of institutions going forward, and what the rules for those might be. And this continues on. This doesn’t stop. This conversation is a perpetual Long Now conversation.

The Role of Geology in US Presidential Elections

In an article in Forbes, David Bressan writes that the giant rift in the USA’s political voting blocs is in part a consequence of collisions between continental plates, the literal giant rift that used to separate the two halves of North America, and recent glacial activity:

The same region that had once been covered in ocean water, leading to the fertile Black Belt, was almost an exact replica of the districts that had voted for Clinton.

The rich coal fields in Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland formed as a result of two continents colliding some 300 million years ago. The coal fueled the economic growth of cities like Pittsburg, Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland.

The Driftless Area is a region west to the Great Lakes that escaped glaciation during the last ice-age. Farming is more difficult here. The election map shows that most countries in the Driftless Area voted Democrats in 2012. It seems that more liberal politics, combined with financial hardship experienced by the local farmers and accentuated by the poor soils, convinced them to vote for Barack Obama.

Last year, astrobiologist Lewis Dartnell made a similar point in a Conversation at The Interval:

Explorers Discover Pinnacle of Coral Taller Than Empire State Building in Great Barrier Reef

Even now, even in shallow waters, the sea continues to surprise us with new wonders (many of them rich in “living fossils” like the chambered nautilus and various sharks).

Reefs are themselves fabulous living examples of multitudinous pace layers, not unlike the structural layers of a house Stewart Brand details in How Buildings Learn—only these buildings literally do learn, as scaffolded colonial organisms with their own inarguable (and manifold) agencies:

Explorers of the Great Barrier Reef have discovered a giant pinnacle of coral taller than the Empire State Building.

Mariners long ago charted seven pinnacle reefs off the cape that, by definition, lie apart from the main barrier system. Bathed in clear waters, the detached reefs swarm with sponges, corals and brightly colored fish — as well as sharks — and are oases for migrating sea life. Their remoteness makes the pinnacles little-studied, and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority has assigned them its highest levels of protection, which limit such activities as commercial fishing. One detached reef at Raine Island is the world’s most important nesting area for green sea turtles.

The new pinnacle was found a mile and a half from a known detached reef. Dr. Beaman, who formerly served in the Royal Australian Navy as a hydrographic surveyor, said he and his team were certain it was previously unknown. Its seven relatives, he added, were all charted in the 1880s, more than 120 years ago.

How “Forest Floors” in Finland’s Daycares Changed Children’s Immune Systems

Once again on the theme of how the technological/cultural pace layer’s accelerating decoupling from the ecological pace layer in which we evolved poses serious risks to the integrity of both the human body and biosphere:

When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather and blueberries, and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time.

Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centres in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days.

“We also found that the intestinal microbiota of children who received greenery was similar to the intestinal microbiota of children visiting the forest every day,” says environmental scientist Marja Roslund from the University of Helsinki.

Daycares in Finland Built a ‘Forest Floor’, And It Changed Children’s Immune Systems in Science Alert

That said, the hopeful news from this pilot project is that it may be easier to restore a healthy balance between the modern and premodern from within the built environment than most people believe.

How Long-term Thinking Can Help Earth Now

Inside Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository, 1,500 feet underground. Photo Credit: Peter Guenzel

With half-lives ranging from 30 to 24,000, or even 16 million years, the radioactive elements in nuclear waste defy our typical operating time frames. The questions around nuclear waste storage — how to keep it safe from those who might wish to weaponize it, where to store it, by what methods, for how long, and with what markings, if any, to warn humans who might stumble upon it thousands of years in the future — require long-term thinking.

These questions brought the anthropologist Vincent Ialenti to Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository in 02012, where he began more than two years of field work with a team of experts seeking to answer them.

Ialenti’s goal was to examine how these experts conceived of the future:

What sort of scientific ethos, I wondered, do Safety Case experts adopt in their daily dealings with seemingly unimaginable spans of time? Has their work affected how they understand the world and humanity’s place within it? If so, how? If not, why not?

Ialenti has crystallized his learnings in his new book, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now. It is a book of extraordinary insight and erudition, thoughtful and lucid throughout its surprisingly-light 180 pages.

Long Now’s Director of Development, Nicholas Paul Brysiewicz, recently posed a few questions to Ialenti about the genesis of his book; the “deflation of expertise” in North America, Western Europe and beyond; conceiving long-term thinking as a kind of exercise for the mind; and more.

Vincent, thanks for sending over a copy of your new book. And thanks for making time to unpack some of those ideas with me here for The Long Now Foundation and our members around the globe.

I’m curious: what drew you to study long-term thinking in the wild?

Vincent Ialenti: In 02008, I was a Masters student in “Law, Anthropology, and Society” at the London School of Economics. I had a growing interest in long-term engineering projects like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Clock of the Long Now. I decided to write my thesis (now published here) on the currently-defunct U.S. Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository’s million-year federal licensing procedure.

The licensing procedure stretched legal adjudication’s foundational rubric of “fact, rule, and judge” into distant futures. The U.S. Department of Energy developed quantitative models of million-year futures as facts. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency defined multi-millennial radiological dose-limit standards as rules. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission subsumed the DOE’s facts to the EPA’s rules to produce a judgment on whether the repository could accept waste. In media commentaries, the Yucca Mountain project was enchanted with aesthetics of high modernist innovation and sci-fi futurology. Yet its decision-making procedure was grounded on an ancient legal procedural bedrock — rubrics formulated as far back as the Roman Empire.

I grew fascinated by this temporal mashup. To delve deeper, though, I knew I’d have to conduct long-term fieldwork. I enrolled in a PhD program at Cornell University. With the help of a U.S. National Science Foundation grant, I spent 32 months among Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear waste repository Safety Caseexperts from 02012–02014. These experts developed models of geological, hydrological, and ecological events that could occur in Western Finland over the coming tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of years. They reckoned with distant future glaciations, climate changes, earthquakes, floods, human and animal population changes, and more. I ended up recording 121 interviews. Those became the basis of my recent book.

Early on in the book you introduce and discuss “the deflation of expertise.” Could you tell us what you mean by this phrase and how you see it shaping long-termism?

We’re witnessing a troubling institutional erosion of expert authority in North America, Western Europe, and beyond. Vaccine science, stem cell research, polling data, climate change models, critical social theories, cell phone radiation studies, pandemic disease advisories, and human evolution research are routinely attacked in cable news free-for-alls and social media echo-chambers. Political power is increasingly gained through charismatic, populist performances that energize crowds by mocking expert virtues of cautious speech and detail-driven analysis. Expert voices are drowned out by Twitter mobs, dulled by corporate-bureaucratic “knowledge management” red tape, exhausted by universities’ adjunctification trends, warped by contingent “gig economy” research funding contracts, and rushed by publish-or-perish productivity pressures.

As enthusiasm for liberal arts education and scientific inquiry declines, societies enter into a state of futurelessness: they develop a manic fixation on the present moment that incessantly shoots down proposals for envisioning better worlds. My book argues that anthropological engagement with Finland’s nuclear waste experts can help us (a) widen our thinking’s time horizons during a moment of ecological crisis some call the Anthropocene and (b) resist the deflation of expertise by opening our ears to a uniquely longsighted form of expert inquiry.

I was heartened each time you pointed to the importance of multidisciplinarity, discursive diversity, and strategic redundancy for doing things at long timescales. Our experience has borne this out, as well. How did you arrive at an emphasis on these themes? What are some of the pitfalls of homogeneity? What about generational homogeneity?

The Safety Case project convened several teams of experts — each with different disciplinary backgrounds — to pursue what my informants called “multiple lines of reasoning.”

Some were systems analysts developing models of how different kinds of radionuclides could “migrate” through future underground water channels. Others were engineers reporting on the mechanical strength tests conducted on Finland’s copper nuclear waste canisters. Some were geologists making analogies that compared the Olkiluoto’s far future Ice Age conditions to those of a glacial ice sheet found in Greenland today. Others studied “archaeological analogues.” This meant comparing future repository components to ancient Roman iron nails found in Scotland, to a bronze cannon from the 17th century Swedish warship Kronan, and to a 2,100-year-old cadaver preserved in clay in China. Still others wrote prose scenarios with titles like The Evolution of the Repository System Beyond a Million Years in the Future.

The Safety Case encompassed multiple disciplinary sensibilities to ensure that one potentially inaccurate assumption doesn’t invalidate the wider range of forecasts. For me, this holistic ethos was a refreshing counterpoint to the reductionist, homogeneous scientism that led us to many of today’s ecological crises.

Certainly, it is important to hedge against generational homogeneity in thought too. Finland’s nuclear waste experts planned to release updated versions of the Safety Case throughout the coming century. They called these successive versions “iterations.” The first major report was 01985’s “Safety Analysis of Disposal of Spent Nuclear Fuel: Normal and Disturbed Evolution Scenarios.” The iteration I studied was the 02012 Construction License Safety Case. The next iteration will be the Operating License Safety Case, scheduled for submission to Finland’s nuclear regulator STUK in late 02021. Each iteration is, ideally, supposed to be more robust than the one before it. The Safety Case is an intergenerational work-in-progress.

Throughout the work you describe long-term thinking as an imaginative exercise — a “calisthenics for the mind.” This suggestion floored me when I read it. I just couldn’t agree more. And earlier this year, prior to reading your book, I even published an essay arguing for that same interpretation. What do you think makes exercise such an apt metaphor for understanding this phenomenon we’re discussing?

We all need to integrate a more vivid awareness of deep time into our everyday habits, actions, and intuitions. We need to override the shallow time discipline into which we’ve been enculturated. This requires self-discipline and ongoing practice. I believe putting aside time to do long-termist intellectual workouts or deep time mental exercise routines can help get us there.

Here’s an example. From 02017 to 02020, I was a researcher at George Washington University in Washington DC. In 01922, fossilized ~100,000-year-old bald cypress trees were found just twenty feet below the nearby city surface. Back then, America’s capital city was a literal swamp. Today, four bald cypresses, planted in the mid-1800s, grow in Lafayette Square right near the White House. I approached them as intellectual exercise equipment for stretching my mind across time. The cypresses provided me with tree imageries I could draw upon when re-imagining the U.S. capital as a prehistoric swamp.

Here’s another example. I sometimes headed west to hike in West Virginia. Hundreds of millions of years ago, Appalachia was home to much taller mountains. Some say their elevations rivaled those of today’s Rockies, Alps, or Himalayas. I tried to discipline my imagination, while hiking, into reimagining the hills in a wider temporal frame. I drew upon on the images I had in my head of what taller mountain ranges look like today. This helped me stretch the momentary “now” of my hike by endowing it with a deeper history and future.

Anyone can do these long-termist exercises. A person in Bangladesh, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Osaka, or Shanghai could, for instance, try imagining their area submerged by, or fighting off, future sea level rise. But what inspired me to integrate these exercises into my own life?

Well, it was — again — my fieldwork among Finland’s nuclear waste experts. I modeled these exercises on the Safety Case’s natural and archaeological analogue studies. The key was to (a) make an analogical connection between one’s immediate surroundings and a dramatically long-term future or past and then (b) try to envision it as accurately as possible by drawing, analogically, from scientific information and imageries we already have in our heads of real-world locales out there today.

What was the most surprising thing you discovered while working on this book?

Early on, I decided to end each chapter with five or six takeaway lessons in long-termism. I call these lessons “reckonings.” As I wrote, however, I was surprised to discover that, even as I engaged with very alien far future Finlands, most of the “reckonings” I collected ended up pertaining to some of the most ordinary features of everyday experience. These include the power of analogy (Chapter 1), the power of pattern-making (Chapter 2), the power of shifting and re-shifting perspectives (Chapter 3), and the problem of human mortality (Chapter 4). I found that these familiarities can be useful. Their sheer relatability can serve as a launching-off point for the rest of us as we pursue long-termist learning. The analogical exercises I mentioned previously are a good example of this.

It’s been so exciting for us to see this next generation of long-term thinkers publishing excellent new books on the topic — from your penetrating work in Deep Time Reckoning to Long Now Seminar Speaker Bina Venkataraman ’s encompassing work in The Optimist’s Telescope to Long Now Seminar Speaker (and author of the foreword to your book) Marcia Bjornerud ’s geological work in Timefulness to Long Now Research Fellow Roman Krznaric ’s philosophical work in The Good Ancestor . What role do you think books play in helping the world think long-term?

Those are important books! I’ll add a few more: David Farrier’s Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, Richard Irvine’s An Anthropology of Deep Time, and Hugh Raffles’ Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time. These pose crucial questions about time, geology, and human (and non-human) imagination. An argument could be made that there’s sort of a diffuse, de-centralized, interdisciplinary “deep time literacy” movement coalescing (mostly on its own!).

This is urgent work. Earlier this year, the Trump Administration advanced a proposal to reform key National Environmental Policy Act regulations to read: “effects should not be considered significant if they are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain.” This is out of sync with our mission to become more mindful of far future worlds. I won’t speak for the others, but my hope is that these books can inch us closer to escaping the virulent short-termism that our current ecological woes, deflations of expertise, and political crises exploit and reinforce.

In closing, I’ll mention that, thanks to you, I now know there is no direct way for me to say “Someday we will have an in-person discussion about all this at The Interval ” in Finnish because Finnish does not have a future tense. And yet here we are, discussing Finnish expertise at thinking about the future. What’s up with that?

Hah! Yes, that’s right. There’s no future tense in Finnish. Finns tend to use the present tense instead. There is something sensible about this: all visions of the future are, indeed, tethered to the present moment. Marcia Bjornerud cleverly linked this linguistic quirk to my book’s broader arguments:

“There is some irony in studying Finns as exemplars of future thinkers: as Ialenti points out, the Finnish language has no future tense. Instead, either present tense or conditional mode verbs are used, which seems a rather oblique way of speaking of times to come. But this linguistic treatment of the future may reflect a deep wisdom in Finnish culture that informs the philosophy of the Safety Case. Making declarative pronouncements about the future is imprudent; the best that can be done is to envisage a spectrum of possible futures and develop a sense for how likely each is to unfold.”

From all of us at and around The Long Now Foundation: thank you for your time and expertise, Vincent.

And thank you! I’ll get back to reading your essay on long-termist askēsis. Keep up the great work.

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Read Long Now Editor Ahmed Kabil’s 02017 feature on the nuclear waste storage problem.Read Vincent Ialenti’s 02016 essay for Long Now, “Craters & Mudrock: Tools for Imagining Distant Finlands.”Watch Ralph Cavanagh and Peter Schwartz’s 02006 Long Now Seminar on Nuclear Power, Climate Change, and the Next 10,000 Years.