deep time

Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

by Vincent Ialenti  · 22 Sep 2020  · 224pp  · 69,593 words

Jinnah and Simon Nicholson, series editors Peter Dauvergne, AI in the Wild: Sustainability in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Vincent Ialenti, Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now DEEP TIME RECKONING HOW FUTURE THINKING CAN HELP EARTH NOW VINCENT IALENTI THE MIT PRESS CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS LONDON, ENGLAND © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of

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, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ialenti, Vincent, author. Title: Deep time reckoning : how future thinking can help Earth now / Vincent Ialenti. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, [2020] | Series: One planet | Includes bibliographical references and

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the tension between individual careers and collective work, the challenge of creating intellectual infrastructures that outlast any particular life span. Ialenti acknowledges that implementing the deep time reckoning practices of the Safety Case in other contexts and cultures will not be easy. He suggests imaginative exercises—“calisthenics for the mind”—that may

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Foundation is developing a mechanical clock to keep time for ten thousand years to help reframe the way people think and embody deep time. The Finnish Society of Bioart’s “Deep Time of Life and Art” project has organized public trips to ancient paintings found on 550-million-year-old rocks located atop Finnish

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and the Brain, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould’s Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, and nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey, to name a few.8 Deep Time Reckoning approaches these problems a bit differently. I am a cultural anthropologist. I believe the best way to study human relationships is

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position that long-termist expertise deserves in society today. The question is how to better support long-sighted experts in cultivating, preserving, and disseminating their deep time knowledge. Inspired by the Safety Case community, the chapters’ reckonings ask: How can societies empower highly trained, long-sighted experts as their future-gazing

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guides? How can today’s shortsighted private companies, government agencies, NGOs, and universities more fully embrace long-termist learning? Can organizations that employ deep time reckoning experts adopt new policies, programs, and workplace norms to better put their talents into the service of preventing Anthropocene collapse? Can these initiatives help

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felt themselves inhabiting a collective intelligence that superseded any individual expert’s intelligence. Personal reflections like these helped me see what the Safety Case’s deep time reckoning was all about. It was about pressing onward toward impossible scientific horizons while working in complex collaborations that, as a whole, exceed any

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to befall the Olkiluoto region over the coming millennia. The moods, ambiances, and cadence of the film were stirring. The story it told was engrossing. Deep time appeared mysterious, overwhelming, awe-inspiring, and otherworldly. For Madsen, Finland’s nuclear waste invited philosophical speculation about the ethics of pollution, human extinction, communication

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caught up in the scientific, regulatory, and engineering details of their work. They focused on technicalities and scientific uncertainties more than any philosophical reverie on deep time’s forbidding expanses. Many abstained from speculating about future human signage systems. Their interests diverged from those of many social scientists, journalists, and humanities scholars

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or multiperspective sensibilities. These sensibilities must be widely cultivated if we are to survive the Anthropocene. The reckonings also ask how today’s communities of deep time reckoners can achieve greater solidarity—pursuing a shared mission to recalibrate experts’ and citizens’ relationships with one another and with the Earth’s future ecosystems

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, scarce expert knowledges. The chapter closes with five reckonings, each offering ideas for surmounting the expert replaceability problems that so often accompany rare but essential deep time reckoning specialists. Today’s societies, it concludes, must resist the deflation of expertise by embracing an ethic of predecessor preservation. This means carefully absorbing,

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and J. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369, no. 1938 (2011): 842–867. 3.  Richard Irvine, “Deep Time: An Anthropological Problem,” Social Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2014). 4.  Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (New York: Basic Books

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book offers only a preliminary step. Future learning-journeys are necessary. The more analogical resources we gather through personal online research, the more sophisticated our deep time reckoning skills become. The more we learn about climate, space, and nuclear waste analogues already identified by scientists, the more interscalar vehicles we have

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crunching, data collection, and computer simulation. It became a space devoid of the “tropes of the aesthetic sublime” common in media and scholarly depictions of deep time.6 It became more a site of technical troubleshooting, logistical organizing, and drab reportage than of apocalyptic dread, cosmic loneliness, overwhelming horror, or existential

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need to invest in developing alternative technologies that they can deploy to deflect incoming asteroids. If they do so, then what? ACCEPTING FUTILITY, RECKONING DEEP TIME ANYWAY This chapter showed how Safety Case experts admitted to and hedged against uncertainties by developing multiple potential models of the future. Each model got

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basic patterning processes that persist across human generations. Reflecting on this can instill in us an appreciation for the deep humanity of deep time reckoning projects. This means appreciating how a deep time forecast, at its core, retains a “human, all too human” character, despite the alien unknowability inevitable to far future worlds.

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and the deeper history of human thought. To appreciate this is to appreciate the two-faced character of deep time. There is, after all, a doubleness to deep time: human worlds can be inside of deep time and deep time can, simultaneously, also be inside of human worlds. Let’s first consider the ways that humanity is

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experts, technologies, communication pathways, reports, formalities, routines, schedules, deadlines, ideas, infrastructures, ecosystems, administrative staffs, customs, norms, emotions, anticipations, and traces of the past. Sometimes their deep time got entangled with the short-term futures of Posiva’s project funding conditions, or the inner workings of interpersonal office politics (as we will see

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them to work toward viewing the Safety Case from different positions, roles, and disciplines. What emerged was a more dynamic, multidimensional form of deep time reckoning. The most skilled deep time reckoners were adept at hopping around between different scales of time. They attempted to see their own thinking from others’ perspectives. They appreciated

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thinking patterns and multitimescale awareness. These could be taught by geologists, climate scientists, cosmologists, anthropologists, nuclear waste experts, archivists, astronomers, philosophers, or other kinds of deep time reckoning experts. Casting long-sighted physical scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars as professional mentors for lifelong learning can do more than just raise awareness

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contributions to humanity in a credible or convincing way, it must bear the criticism of skeptical publics and media pundits. A GLOBAL DEEP TIME RECKONING ASSOCIATION This chapter revealed how deep time reckoning worked best when several different kinds of experts envisioned far future worlds from several different scales, levels, and frames of analysis

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textured, multifaceted, multidimensional long-termism that defies insular information silos and disciplinary echo chambers. To facilitate this greater cohesion, we could set up an international Deep Time Reckoning Association. This group could be modeled on highly interdisciplinary expert organizations, such as the Society for Social Studies of Science. It could be a

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s “Hollywood, Health & Society” institute. That institute advises entertainment industry professionals on human health, security, and safety issues to improve popular media accuracy. However, the Deep Time Reckoning Association’s main mission would be to nudge long-sighted experts toward self-identifying as a pragmatic multidisciplinary community that global society must rely

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of Anthropocene breakthroughs could emerge? The Safety Case experts showed how cross-pollinating many different kinds of long-termist expertise can help an organization reckon deep time. Deep Time Reckoning Association members would, in a similar spirit, break down barriers between expert communities and hone long-sighted knowledge together. To facilitate this, they

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them take a step back from their work, as this chapter’s Safety Case experts did, and sustain the aspirational motivation and intellectual energy that deep time reckoning requires. SHIFTING ANGLES AND SCALES Professionals from all sorts of different organizations’ multimillennial divisions could pool ideas at a yearly global conference, hosted

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by the Deep Time Reckoning Association. Yet deep time thinking must be seen as a year-round activity, just as it was for Safety Case experts. It must be the duty of

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from Seppo’s expertise’s “afterlives” can offer lessons for tackling the challenges of replacing experts. These are challenges that commonly face rare but essential deep time reckoning specialists. In response, today’s societies must embrace an ethic of predecessor preservation. This means carefully absorbing, tending to, and disseminating insights from

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loss that expert mortality can pose. The reckonings that follow ask: How can we brainstorm new programs and norms of professional engagement among communities of deep time reckoners—be they climatologists, paleontologists, philosophers, nuclear waste experts, biodiversity specialists, evolutionary biologists, historians, archaeologists, astrophysicists, or others—plus those working closely with them?

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interviewed about the expert’s thinking. This is something I learned gradually as I conducted interview after interview about Seppo. To this end, organizations employing deep time reckoners can take cues from nineteenth- and twentieth-century “salvage anthropology” projects. These were efforts to collect artifacts, archive knowledge, and interview insiders of

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aspiration was to preserve some of their precious ways and ideas before their last surviving members died or assimilated into other societies. GLOBAL DEEP TIME RECKONING INFORMATION REPOSITORY A key deep time reckoner’s knowledge must not be hoarded by any individual or organization. It must be conserved for posterity and disseminated widely across

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populations. Perhaps, then, the findings, forecasts, scenarios, ideas, models, interview recordings, meetings transcripts, and notebooks from deep time reckoners from many different sectors and fields should be archived. Their long-termist knowledge could be databased and backed up in an international information repository

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-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

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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

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-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

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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. DEEP TIME RECKONING LEXICON Adventurous learning A thoughtful intellectual approach of actively seeking out scientifically informed knowledge while embracing an anthropologically informed openness to careful, skeptical, critical

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into the Earth’s oceans to raise their carbon dioxide uptake, or to pump reflective particles into the Earth’s atmosphere to deflect sunlight. Global Deep Time Reckoning Association A proposed international organization that aims to unite long-sighted experts of many kinds—astrophysicists, geologists, historians, cosmologists, anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, archivists,

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usually kept apart.” Iteration Finland’s nuclear waste repository Safety Case experts’ stepwise approach of developing progressively new and improved versions, or “iterations,” of their deep time reckoning models before each successive repository license application submission deadline. Between the publication of each new version of the Safety Case, lessons learned from the

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Geo-history, 15 Geological change, humans as agents of, 16 Geological Survey of Finland (GTK), 10, 35 George Washington University, 62 Ginsburg, Benjamin, 28 Global Deep Time Reckoning Information Repository, 154, 158–159 Gould, Stephen Jay, 3, 17 Graeber, David, 29, 151 Great Acceleration, and the Anthropocene, 15 Greenland Analogue Project,

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Hollywood & Society institute (USC), 115 Hecht, Gabrielle, 23, 57–58 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 135 Helsinki University of Technology, 100. See also Aalto University Heuristics, deep time, 85–87 Higgs, Peter, 28 Hiljainen tieto, 73, 159 Hiljaisuus, 32, 159 Human extinction, 3 “Human Interface Task Force” (Bechtel Corporation), 24 Husserl, Edmund, 151

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Hutton, James, 17 Ice Age, coming, 12 “Imagining Deep Time” (National Academy of Science), 3 Industrial Revolution, and the Anthropocene, 15 Infinition, 64, 159 Input/output patterns, 77–79 International Atomic Energy Agency, 21 International

Underland: A Deep Time Journey

by Robert Macfarlane  · 1 May 2019  · 489pp  · 136,195 words

UNDERLAND A Deep Time Journey ROBERT MACFARLANE W. W. NORTON & COMPANY Independent Publishers Since 1923 New York | London Is it dark down there Where the grass grows through the

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lives, or to admit its disturbing forms to our imaginations. Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving. We are presently living through the Anthropocene, an epoch of immense and often frightening change at a planetary scale, in which

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didn’t realise they had . . . a dark force of “sleeping giants”’, roused from their deep time slumber. ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland. Deep time is the dizzying expanses of Earth history that stretch away from the present moment. Deep time is measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes

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and years. Deep time is kept by stone, ice, stalactites, seabed sediments and the drift of tectonic plates. Deep time opens into the future as well as the past. The Earth will fall dark when the sun exhausts its fuel

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around 5 billion years. We stand with our toes, as well as our heels, on a brink. There is dangerous comfort to be drawn from deep time. An ethical lotus-eating beckons. What does our behaviour matter, when Homo sapiens will have disappeared from the Earth in the blink of a geological

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’s cycles of erosion and repair. We should resist such inertial thinking; indeed, we should urge its opposite – deep time as a radical perspective, provoking us to action not apathy. For to think in deep time can be a means not of escaping our troubled present, but rather of re-imagining it; countermanding its

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quick greeds and furies with older, slower stories of making and unmaking. At its best, a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to

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come, bringing us to consider what we are leaving behind for the epochs and beings that will follow us. When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert. New responsibilities declare themselves. A conviviality of being leaps to mind and eye. The world becomes eerily various and

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moves over its course from the dark matter formed at the universe’s birth to the nuclear futures of an Anthropocene-to-come. During the deep time voyage undertaken between those two remote points, the line about which the telling folds is the ever-moving present. Across its chapters, in keeping with

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by the associated visionary powers of darkness and blindness. The poems he writes about the underland feel to me both unearthed and unearthly. In them deep time is given utterance, earth is stirred, stone speaks. In them, too, the dead are quickened briefly back to life by the poet’s attention. The

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limestone can be seen as merely one phase in a dynamic earth cycle, whereby mineral becomes animal becomes rock; rock that will in time – in deep time – eventually supply the calcium carbonate out of which new organisms will build their bodies, thereby re-nourishing the same cycle into being again. This dance

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as inert matter, obdurate in its fixity. But here in the rift it feels instead like a liquid briefly paused in its flow. Seen in deep time, stone folds as strata, gouts as lava, floats as plates, shifts as shingle. Over aeons, rock absorbs, transforms, levitates from seabed to summit. Down here

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of the plane apart millions of years later, water has worked to burnish an absence between them, and our onwards route is into this deep time space, this deep time vice. We enter the bedding plane with trepidation, leaning back on the lower angle of stone, and sliding ourselves onwards into the darkness, the

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that space back. So the scientists working in the Boulby laboratory know they are operating in a temporary zone, with limited years of safe life. Deep time must be studied fast. ‘Those are your emergency exits in case of a sudden slump in the halite,’ says Christopher, mimicking the hand gestures of

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increase the plasticity of the halite – and so once each chamber is replete, the warmed halite should creep around the barrels, securing them for the deep time future. I am briefly filled with a longing to step into a side tunnel myself, lie down and let the halite slowly seal me in

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beings now, as well as between humans and more-than-humans still to come. Perhaps above all the Anthropocene compels us to think forwards in deep time, and to weigh what we will leave behind, as the landscapes we are making now will sink into strata, becoming underlands. What is the history

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shaping. The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’ But to think ahead in deep time runs against the mind’s grain. Try it yourself, now. Imagine forwards a year. Now ten. Now a century. Imagination falters, details thin out. Try

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of worlds-to-be. As a species, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists. While we have devised abbreviations for marking out deep time in the past – BP for ‘before present’; MYA for ‘million years ago’ – we have no equivalent abbreviations for marking out

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deep time in the future. No one speaks of AP for ‘after present’, or MYA for ‘million years ahead’. The Anthropocene requires us to undertake a retrospective

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takes time to arrive. Lying there with bedrock in all directions, I wonder at what will remain of our cities as the Anthropocene unfolds over deep time – the stratigraphic markers that will endure in the rock record. Over millions of years, the inland megacities of Delhi and Moscow will largely erode into

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hanks of blue rope, tangles of nylon with rusty hooks, net-webs rolled up with weed. Something I heard an archaeologist say in Oslo about deep time returns to me: Time isn’t deep, it is always already all around us. The past ghosts us, lies all about us less as layers

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also be to imagine it as a ‘medium’ in the supernatural sense: a presence permitting communication with the dead and the buried, across gulfs of deep time, through which one might hear distant messages from the Pleistocene. Ice has an exceptional memory – but it also suffers from memory loss. The weight on

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it makes a torn-page match with the gneiss of the Outer Hebrides. Hundreds of millions of years ago, these two coastlines were united. A deep time kinship existed between this wildly unfamiliar region, and those Scottish islands in which I felt at home. It is six miles across the channel from

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is in reach and nothing is within touch. The immensity and the vibrancy of the ice are beyond anything I have encountered before. Seen in deep time – viewed even in the relatively shallow time since the last glaciation – the notion of human dominance over the planet seems greedy, delusory. Up there on

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, and the sun is streaming its gold on the silver of the ice, and I am blue to my bones for days afterwards from that deep time dive. Later we send Bill down too, and from a depth of thirty feet he sings an aria from Tosca. The notes pour up through

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that our conventional modes of imagination and communication collapse in consideration of them. Decades and centuries feel pettily brief, language seems irrelevant compared to the deep time stone-space of Onkalo and what it will hold. The half-life of uranium-235 is 4.46 billion years: such chronology decentres the human

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and writers of science fiction. Present plans for what Gregory Benford has called ‘our society’s largest conscious attempt to communicate across the abyss of deep time’ include the following measures. First the chambers and the access shafts will be backfilled. Then a thirty-foot-high berm of rock and tamped earth

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– seem to me our most perfected Anthropocene text, our blackest mass. But I know also that even those words will decay over the course of deep time – blasted from the stone by desert wind, eaten from it by atmospheric moisture, or lost in translation. For language has its half-life too, its

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:2 (2017), 182–93; ‘sleeping giants’ is quoted from Graham Harman, Immaterialism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), p. 7. 15 ‘Deep time’ is the chronology of the underland: the coining of the phrase ‘deep time’ is usually attributed to John McPhee in Basin and Range (New York: FSG, 1981); John Playfair wrote of ‘the abyss

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texts I find most interesting are detailed in the bibliography and are drawn on in this brief discussion of the concept and its implications for deep time, politics and ethics. 76 ‘stratigraphically optimal’: Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, ‘When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth-Century Limit

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: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 200. Chapter 12: The Hiding Place Pages 398 Deep in the bedrock of Olkiluoto Island . . .: I have been writing about ‘deep time’ since my first book, Mountains of the Mind (London: Granta, 2003). In respect of radiological as well as geological time, I draw in this chapter

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Weir, ‘Deep Decay: Into Diachronic Polychromatic Material Fictions’, PARSE 4 (2017) <http://parsejournal.com/ article/deep-decay-into-diachronic-polychromatic-material-fictions/>; Vincent Ialenti, ‘Adjudicating Deep Time: Revisiting the United States’ High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project at Yucca Mountain’, Science & Technology Studies 27:2 (2014), 27–48, and ‘Death and Succession

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a trail of myths. . . keep people away’: D’Agata, About a Mountain, p. 93. 412 ‘our society’s largest conscious attempt. . . the abyss of deep time’: Gregory Benford, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millennia (New York: Avon Books, 1999), p. 85. 413 The map will be slightly domed: see for details and diagram

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of Time, trans. Faith Wallis (725; Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999) Bélanger, Pierre, ‘Altitudes of Urbanisation’, Tunnelling and Underground Space Technology 55 (2016) *Benford, Gregory, Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates across Millennia (New York: Avon Books, 1999) *Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London: Harvard University Press

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. H. and A. M. Blackmore (1862; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Hussey, Andrew, Paris: The Secret History (London: Penguin, 2007) Hutton, Noah (dir.), Deep Time (2015) Ialenti, Vincent, ‘Adjudicating Deep Time: Revisiting the United States’ High-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project at Yucca Mountain’, Science & Technology Studies 27:2 (2014) ________, ‘Death and Succession among

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–6 de Bernières, Louis 99 death camps 282–3 Debord, Guy 155 Décure, Beauséjour 148–9 deep-mapping 17–18, 195 see also seismic mapping deep time 15–16, 77–8, 341–2, 353, 362, 377 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe 310–11 deforestation 76 Delhi 171 DeLillo, Don 154 Underworld 320 Demeter 28

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mapping; smuggling; storing, underground bias against depth 13 cataphilia 141–3 and the criminal underworld 159 see also smuggling deep-mapping practices 17–18, 195 deep time of 15–16, 77–8, 353, 377 doorways to 3–4, 14, 29, 35, 45, 132, 134, 162, 184, 247, 308 see also manholes; sinkholes

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@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830 The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Macfarlane, Robert, 1976–author. Title: Underland : a deep time journey / Robert Macfarlane. Description: First American edition. | New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019000216 | ISBN 9780393242140 (hardcover

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior

by Jonah Berger  · 13 Jun 2016  · 261pp  · 72,277 words

hopping about, you finally see it. There, in the fading light of the afternoon, you find the perfect spot. Shady, nicely vegetated, and not too deep. Time to use your vocal cords and let the ladies know you’re single and ready to mingle. But before you can find Ms. Right Now

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression

by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean  · 9 Nov 2012

. David Link, “There Must Be an Angel: On the Beginnings of the Arithmetics of Rays,” in Siegfried Zielinski and David Link, eds., Variantology 2: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies (Cologne: König, 2006), 15–42; available at http://www.alpha60.de/research/ muc/. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. Interestingly, Link

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Link, “Scrambling T-R-U-T-H: Rotating Letters as a Material Form of Thought,” in Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fürlus, eds., Variantology 4: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World (Cologne: König, 2010), 215–266. 43. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge

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, David. “Scrambling T-R-U-T-H: Rotating Letters as a Material Form of Thought.” In Siegfried Zielinski and Eckhard Fürlus, eds., Variantology 4: On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies in the Arabic-Islamic World, 215–266. Cologne: König, 2010. Link, David. “There Must Be an Angel: On the

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Beginnings of the Arithmetics of Rays.” In Siegfried Zielinski and David Link, eds., Variantology 2. On Deep Time Relations of Arts, Sciences and Technologies, 15–42. Cologne: König, 2006. Lukács, Georg. History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxism. 1922; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour  · 20 Aug 2019  · 297pp  · 83,651 words

write, we give ourselves a second body.43 There is something miraculous about this, the existence of a ‘scripturient’ animal, barely a dot in the deep time of the planet’s history. Early theories of writing could hardly resist seeing it as divine – ‘God-breathed’, as the Book of Timothy has it

Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking

by Cecilia Heyes  · 15 Apr 2018

History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 62, 42–50. Sterelny, K. (in press). Culture and the extended phenotype: Cognition and material culture in deep time. In A. Newen, L. de Bruin, and S. Gallagher (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognition: Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sterelny

Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents

by Lisa Gitelman  · 26 Mar 2014

“the Media” as such. Organizing chapters partly around unsung and offbeat heroes72 seconds the work done by Siegfried Zielinski to populate what he terms the “deep time of media” with illuminating dead ends, gee-­whizzery, and what-­ifs, while it also aligns with Guillory’s observation that documents raise “questions about writing

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sensitive to it here. See Huhtamo and Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” in Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 1–24. 73. Siegfried Zielinski, Deep Time of Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means, trans. Gloria Custance (Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006); Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity

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Hopkins University Press, 1989. ———. Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Zielinski, Siegfried. Deep Time of Media: Toward an Archaeology of Hearing and Seeing by Technical Means. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2006. Zuboff, Shoshana. In the

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by Mark O'Connell  · 28 Feb 2017  · 252pp  · 79,452 words

goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time. In the last of what he calls the “Six Epochs of Evolution,” after the great fusion of humanity and AI, intelligence “will begin to saturate

Python for Data Analysis: Data Wrangling with Pandas, NumPy, and IPython

by Wes McKinney  · 25 Sep 2017  · 1,829pp  · 135,521 words

data structures and tools providing this functionality. As a result of having been built initially to solve finance and business analytics problems, pandas features especially deep time series functionality and tools well suited for working with time-indexed data generated by business processes. For users of the R language for statistical computing

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World

by John Michael Greer  · 30 Sep 2009

. On the broadest of those scales, the one evolutionary 61 62 T he E cotechnic F u t u re ­biologist Stephen Jay Gould named “deep time,”5 an evolutionary leap unquestionably plays a role in shaping our future, but that leap has already happened. The emergence of the first technic societies

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many more minor ones, and the timing of those leaps appears random even in retrospect. In human terms, this pattern works on the scale of deep time, defined by the lifespan of the human species. The historical setting of modern industrial civilization can only be grasped in full against the background of

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death, 49–50 culture wars, 191 D dark age(s), xiii, 150, 184 Darwin, Charles, 193 decline and fall of civilizations, 17, 38, 150, 243 deep time, 62 democracy, 186–188 depopulation, 39, 41–43 Dijkstra, Bram, 193–194 disintegration, political and cultural, 40, 46–50 dissensus, 96–99, 246 draft horses

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How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

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London Under

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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

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Climbing Mount Improbable

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The Day the World Stops Shopping

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Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality

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The World Without Us

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The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

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Coming of Age in the Milky Way

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Clock of the Long Now

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Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic

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The Moon: A History for the Future

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Dinosaurs Rediscovered

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In Harm's Way: The Sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the Extraordinary Story of Its Survivors

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This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

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Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World

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More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity

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Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

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Ancestral Night

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Velocity Weapon

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Lonely Planet Egypt

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The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

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Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars

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Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods

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Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist

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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

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Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

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1491

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The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel

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Being You: A New Science of Consciousness

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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet

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Year's Best SF 15

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Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

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Wonders of the Universe

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The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

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Children of Ruin

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Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide

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The Fabric of the Cosmos

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Accelerando

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Wireless

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Anvil of Stars

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Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past

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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

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Iron Sunrise

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Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers

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The Age of Wonder

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House of Suns

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The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind

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The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World

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The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution

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Legacy

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Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

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To Sleep in a Sea of Stars

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Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

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