At the Trollstigen lookout, Norway. Photo courtesy Vegard Haugland
Looking forward from where we are into the abyss of future time, imagining what yet may be, is not something we’re used to doing. But it’s something I believe we ought deliberately to do much more often, in order to correct what amounts to an unbalanced outlook and to discover our place in time.
To see things as they are includes seeing them as they will be, and that means picturing ourselves and our own position in time not as coming at the end, jutting out into empty space with nothing beyond, but as tucked in with manifestations of life both behind us and ahead of us. Tucked in, just as Darwin’s or Hutton’s time is for us as we look back on it now. This is how things will be.
Why has recognising the deep future been so difficult for humanity? Why, after discovering the place of the Earth in the solar system, the place of the solar system in the universe, the age of the Earth, the age of the universe, and evolution by natural selection over aeons of Earth’s history, do we still need to be prodded to perform the simple act of turning around, to position ourselves to see both forward and back in time?
The first, and most obvious reason, is simple human self-preoccupation. The line of evolution reaches us, and we find it hard to imagine it moving further. Hugely impressed with our own accomplishments, including those just listed, we give little thought to beings who might come after us or to ideas not yet a twinkle in evolution’s eye. There is also a more practical reason. Most human goals, including altruistic ones, rise or fall over the short period of a human lifetime. And although we might look back – even far back – with interest, perhaps to learn from our kind’s history, there is nothing in the far future that is similarly tied up with our goals. As a result, we haven’t developed the habits of mind necessary to consider it carefully.
The past has another kind of allure for us, one tied closely to the way we see ourselves. When we do lift our heads from immediate human concerns and exert the imagination needed to think in scientific timescales, our attention is often drawn in a special way to times gone by. As attested by hundreds of television programmes, many narrated by the enthusiastic David Attenborough, things that occurred in the recesses of evolutionary time can touch us deeply, for they affect our very sense of identity. Having discovered evolution, we now know that many secrets about who we are might be exposed by the palaeoanthropologist’s shovel or brush. But there is no bed of deposits where one can dig up the fossils of one’s descendants.
The Bible does not tell us ‘The beginning is near!’ but rather ‘The end is near!’
Realising that our enquiry into the fundamental nature of the world is just beginning, we might have to say that, for all we know, some of the new ideas of the future will be old ideas, whose time has finally come.
Finally, we can always blame the Bible. Whether you think of it as casting a long shadow across the history of Western culture or as fathering a great light within it, there is no denying the Bible’s powerful influence on the way that we think today. And you might have noticed that there’s not much about a billion-year future in it. The Bible does not tell us ‘The beginning is near!’ but rather ‘The end is near!’ When I was a child, I helped my father put an actual sign at the end of our driveway that said ‘Jesus is coming soon!’ And although his brand of enthusiastic evangelicalism sponsored endless disputes with other Christians – even other evangelicals – as to how things will transpire in the near future, on the matter of whether we are living in the end times he was in lockstep with other biblical believers. If you allow for secular eschatologies, he was also in lockstep with the rest of the culture, which has by now spun out rather a large number of variations on the biblical Armageddon-just-around-the-corner theme. We all want to live in the most exciting, most consequential chapter of time, it seems.
All of these consequences, and many others too, might be waiting for us in a proper perspective on deep time and our place in it, which cannot be far off now. None of these consequences – do notice – requires us to say that intelligent life (whether in a human form or as configured in some species coming after us) necessarily will travel on a great deal further, traversing much more of the 20ft line, or that deep new insights will necessarily be won. In particular, our travels so far through logical space – the space of ideas – might not be as near a beginning as our travels through temporal space, scientifically construed. But, by the same token, they might be. Even half the humility of Darwin will lead you to see that there might be aspects of reality we’ve not yet evolved the ability to handle intellectually. And so, allow yourself to get giddy. For all we know, human enquiry on our planet is still in its infancy.
All of these consequences, and many others too, might be waiting for us in a proper perspective on deep time and our place in it, which cannot be far off now. None of these consequences – do notice – requires us to say that intelligent life (whether in a human form or as configured in some species coming after us) necessarily will travel on a great deal further, traversing much more of the 20ft line, or that deep new insights will necessarily be won. In particular, our travels so far through logical space – the space of ideas – might not be as near a beginning as our travels through temporal space, scientifically construed. But, by the same token, they might be. Even half the humility of Darwin will lead you to see that there might be aspects of reality we’ve not yet evolved the ability to handle intellectually. And so, allow yourself to get giddy. For all we know, human enquiry on our planet is still in its infancy.
