Not the universe.

Carlo Rovelli lecturing at the Royal Institute

The passage of time is not for us a rational thing to contemplate. It’s something we live into — we are the passage of time. We are this constant computing of time.

We can think about reality without space. We can think about reality without things. But it’s very hard to think yourself in a reality without time. You wouldn’t know how to start thinking.

But the confusion is: is this because reality by itself cannot be thought of without time?

No, it is because our thinking cannot be thought without time. We cannot think without time. We are a time machine. Not the universe.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli, The Physics and Philosophy of Time [at 43:41], the Royal Institution, 13 June 2018

The one minute

BARKEEPER

Will you go looking for her?

THOMAS

She is in the past.

…The past is not my concern.

And the future is no longer my concern either.

BARKEEPER

What is your concern, Tommy?

THOMAS

The one minute.

The soldiers minute.

In a battle that’s all you get.

One minute of everything at once.

And anything before is nothing.

Everything after, nothing.

Nothing in comparison in that one minute.

Peaky Blinders, season 1 episode 7 (wiki)

Long-term backwards vision

Instead of formulating meaningful visions for where humankind will be in 2050, [our leaders] repackage nostalgic fantasies about the past — and there’s a kind of competition: who can look back further. Trump wants to go back to the 1950s; Putin basically wants to go back to the Czarist Empire, and you have the Islamic State that wants to go back to seventh-century Arabia. Israel — they beat everybody. They want to go back 2,500 years to the age of the Bible, so we win. We have the longest-term vision backwards.
Israili historian and author Yuval Harari, from What’s Next for Humanity: Automation, New Morality and a ‘Global Useless Class’, by Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, 19 March 2018

The big stuff can never get done

“Any strategy that involves crossing a valley — accepting short-term losses to reach a higher hill in the distance — will soon be brought to a halt by the demands of a system that celebrates short-term gains and tolerates stagnation, but condemns anything else as failure. In short, a world where big stuff can never get done.”
Innovation Starvation by Neal Stephenson, Wired, 27 October 2011

Now the war

“Now the war has come to Walmart. And Hooters. And Sam’s Club and McDonald’s, and an unnamed but homey looking restaurant that has a $7.99 Lunch Special. If this doesn’t look like war, that’s only because we so reflexively resist the idea of a war on American soil that we refuse to see the obvious.”
What perpetual war looks like in America, by art and architecture critic Philip Kennicott, Washington Post, 4 August 2019
Hooters2019-08-06.png

Kennicott's essay, in reaction to this week's mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, begins with a reflection on a photograph by Joel Angel Juarez of police in paramilitary gear outside a Hooter’s restaurant in El Paso.

Kennicott continues,

This convergence of our commercial landscape with violence is what the 21st century, ­slow-motion but persistent American war looks like. It also looks like the underside of a child’s school desk, people hiding in closets and wailing into cellphones, SWAT teams in parking lots, nightclubs with overturned bar stools and tables, piles of shoes abandoned outside a bar, and movie theaters soaked in gore. If we have the courage to do what we must do and look at the facts, we will also see that in one essential way, the American war looks like every other war everywhere on the planet, full of bodies riddled with bullets, bloodied, broken and dead.

Some wars are over in a day, or a week, and others go on for years. If there are opportunists and profiteers and cynical actors who are willing to fuel the mayhem for a tiny bit of personal or political advantage, then they can go on for decades. If war takes root in a society slowly, or by stealth, it can come to seem the ordinary state of affairs.

“[By 2018] the transmission of pictures and texts and the distant manipulation of computers and other machines will be added to the transmission of the human voice on a scale that will eventually approach the universality of telephony. What all this will do to the world I cannot guess. It seems bound to affect us all.”
— J. R. Pierce, Bell Labs, 1968. From “Toward the Year 2018”, edited by Emmanuel G. Mesthene, as quoted in What 2018 Looked Like Fifty Years Ago, New Yorker, 7 January 2019
“Talking to the Kuiper belt is like talking to an Ent, from the other side of the forest.”
— Astrophysicist @ascendingNode, on communicating with the New Horizons spacecraft at the edge of the solar system, 8 December 2018. Note the distance between Earth and the probe (1.57 billion KM) and the power of the signal we receive from it (1.46 x 10-21 kW, which is a very very very small voice to hear.
ent

It takes decades

It takes decades for significant change to be realized. This has serious implications for urban policy and leadership because the timescale of political processes by which decisions about a city’s future are made is at best just a few years, and for most politicians two years is infinity. Nowadays, their success depends on rapid returns and instant gratification in order to conform to political pressures and the demands of the electoral process. Very few mayors can afford to think in a time frame of twenty to fifty years and put their major efforts toward promoting strategies that will leave a truly long-term legacy of significant achievement.
Geoffrey West, Scale, 2017

Speed

I first came to the United States in September 1961 to attend graduate school in physics at Stanford University in California. I took a steam train from King’s Cross Station in London up to Liverpool, where I boarded the Canadian steamship the Empress of England and sailed for almost ten days across the Atlantic, down the St. Lawrence River, eventually disembarking in Montreal. I stayed overnight before taking a Greyhound bus that deposited me in California four days later, having spent one night at the YMCA in Chicago, where I changed buses. The entire journey was an extraordinary experience that transported me across many dimensions, not least of which was anamazing introduction to the variety, diversity, and eccentricity of American life, including an appreciation of its immense geographical size. Fifty-five years later I am still trying to process everything I experienced on that road trip as I continue to grapple with the meaning and enigma of America and all that it stands for.
Geoffrey West, in his book 'Scale', 2017

Everything nowadays is ultra

Everything nowadays is ultra, everything is being transcended continually in thought as well as in action. No one knows himself any longer; no one can grasp the element in which he lives and works or the materials that he handles. Pure simplicity is out of the question; of simplifiers we have enough. Young people are stirred up much too early in life and then carried away in the whirl of the times. Wealth and rapidity are what the world admires…Railways, quick mails, steamships, and every possible kind of rapid communication are what the educated world seeks but it only over-educates itself and thereby persists in its mediocrity.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1825 From Goethe's Letters to Zelter, London: George Bell & Sons, 1887 (as quoted in Scale by Geoffrey West, 2017)

A shadow of what they once were

But extinction is not the only tragedy through which we’re living. What about the species that still exist, but as a shadow of what they once were? In “The Once and Future World,” the journalist J.B. MacKinnon cites records from recent centuries that hint at what has only just been lost: “In the North Atlantic, a school of cod stalls a tall ship in midocean; off Sydney, Australia, a ship’s captain sails from noon until sunset through pods of sperm whales as far as the eye can see. ... Pacific pioneers complain to the authorities that splashing salmon threaten to swamp their canoes.” There were reports of lions in the south of France, walruses at the mouth of the Thames, flocks of birds that took three days to fly overhead, as many as 100 blue whales in the Southern Ocean for every one that’s there now. “These are not sights from some ancient age of fire and ice,” MacKinnon writes. “We are talking about things seen by human eyes, recalled in human memory.”
The Insect Apocalypse Is Here by Brooke Jarvis, New York Times Magazine, 27 November 2918.

…A small window in which to act

“The excruciating power of Zweig’s memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.”
— When it’s too late to stop Racism, According to Stefan Zweig, The New Yorker, June 22, 2018
“Smart people are beginning to understand the size of the problem, but they haven’t yet figured out the timing; they haven’t yet figured out that the latest science shows that this wave is already breaking over our heads.”
— Bill McKibben, 2010, on climate change. Eaarth, p 51
“The true debate lies in the solutions and in mobilizing the social and political will to act upon our knowledge. Deciding not to act is a choice itself, and one that we cannot correct later. The time to act is always now. Because the longer we wait, the worse the outcomes will be.”
— Climate scientist Andrea Dutton, in Axios, Special report: A 30-year alarm on the reality of climate change