About Time

Speed, Society, People and the Environment

Tim Aldrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351280624
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Where does all the time go? Despite the burgeoning army of machines designed to save us time – from cars and aeroplanes to dishwashers and microwaves – we don't seem to have any more of it on our hands. We simply fill the space we clear with more things to do – consuming more, spending more – and then look around for new ways of saving time. And so we spiral onwards, upwards, ever faster. Being busy has become a habit, and a habit that gives us high status – busy people are important people. The business of business is busy-ness. We are moving from a world in which the big eats the small, to a world where the fast eats the slow. But the fallout from a society hooked on speed is everywhere. It's affecting our health: 60 per cent of the adult population in the UK report that they suffer from stress, and more than half of these say that this has worsened over the last 12 months. It's affecting our family life, with a quarter of British families sharing a meal together only once a month. And it affects our environment too: air travel is a major source of carbon dioxide emissions, accelerating climate change as we speed around the world. And the faster we live, the faster we consume, the faster we waste energy and the faster we pollute the planet. The faster we seem to be running out of time. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the structure and values of this high-speed society? What are we running from and what are we running towards?

Sustainable development is all about time. It's about trying to safeguard the health of the planet, and the people it supports, indefinitely, unconstrained by time. The idea of time offers a novel perspective on what sustainable development is all about. Looking at issues affecting society and the environment through the prism of time conveys the urgency of the challenge and leads us to solutions we might not have thought of before. About Time, edited by the think-tank Forum for the Future, brings together ten of the world's leading thinkers and writers, including Will Hutton, Baroness Mary Warnock, Sir Martin Rees, Ghillean Prance, Jay Griffiths (the author of the bestselling Pip Pip) and Jonathon Porritt, from disciplines including biology, business, sociology, ethnography, astronomy, philosophy, politics, history and sustainability in a collection of intriguing essays exploring the issue of time and how it relates to the environment, economy and society.

The first half of this collection looks at different dimensions of time – from the history of time as a social phenomenon and cultural notions of time, to cosmological time and the difference between human and machine time. These "think-pieces" are followed by a series of more practical, solutions-oriented contributions, looking at how we deal with time in different contexts – from the slow food movement and time banks to long-term thinking in politics and what we can individually do to cope with the speed society.

Contributions are liberally interspersed with boxes and brief pieces offering bite-sized facts, figures and insights relating to time and our everyday lives. About Time is a high-profile collection aimed at creating debate about where the values of our contemporary society are taking us. It will foster reflective thinking about different aspects of time, using the concept of time to communicate and illuminate the idea of sustainable development and question our idolatry of speed. In doing so, it aims to inspire and help decision-makers in business, government and elsewhere to appreciate the challenges of sustainable development, and inspire individuals to create change in their own lives. For readers of No Logo and Longitude, this book provides a thought-provoking twist, bringing together time and sustainability in a refreshing, provocative and accessible way.

1
Perspectives on time

Martin Rees

About 4.5 billion years have elapsed since our Sun condensed from a cosmic cloud. The proto-Sun was encircled by a swirling disk of gas. Dust in this disk agglomerated into a swarm of orbiting rocks, which then coalesced to form the planets. One of these became our Earth – the ‘third rock from the Sun’. The young Earth was buffeted by collisions with other bodies, some almost as large as the planets themselves: one such impact gouged out enough molten rock to make the Moon. Conditions quietened and the Earth cooled, setting the scene for the emergence of the first life.

A memorable early photograph taken from space depicted ‘Earthrise’, as viewed from a spacecraft orbiting the Moon. Our habitat of land, oceans and clouds was revealed as a thin delicate glaze, its beauty and vulnerability contrasting with the stark and sterile moonscape on which the astronauts left their footprints. We have had these distant images of the entire Earth only for the last four decades. But our planet has existed for more than a hundred million times longer than this.

A brief history of a planet

For more than a billion years, oxygen accumulated in the Earth’s atmosphere – a consequence of the first unicellular life. Thereafter, there were slow changes in the vegetation, and in the shape of the land masses as the continents drifted. The ice cover waxed and waned: there may even have been episodes when the entire Earth froze over, appearing white rather than pale blue.

The only abrupt worldwide changes were triggered by major asteroid impacts or volcanic super-eruptions. Occasional incidents like these would have flung so much debris into the stratosphere that for several years, until all the dust and aerosols settled again, the Earth looked dark grey, rather than bluish white, and no sunlight penetrated down to land or ocean. Apart from these brief traumas, nothing happened suddenly: successions of new species emerged, evolved and became extinct on geological time-scales of millions of years.

But in just a tiny sliver of the Earth’s history – the last one millionth part, a few thousand years – the patterns of vegetation altered much faster than before. This signalled the start of agriculture – the imprint on the terrain of a population of humans, empowered by tools. The pace of change accelerated as human populations rose. But then quite different transformations were perceptible; and these were even more abrupt. Within 50 years –little more than one hundredth of a millionth of the Earth’s age, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which over most of Earth’s history had been slowly falling, suddenly began to rise much faster.

Imagine that a race of scientifically advanced extraterrestrials had been watching our Solar System over the whole 4 billion years. On the previous evidence they might confidently predict that the Earth would face doom in another 6 billion years, when the Sun, in its death throes, will swell up into a ‘red giant’ and vaporise anything remaining on our planet’s surface. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spasm less than halfway through the Earth’s life – these human-induced alterations occupying, overall, less than a millionth of the elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed?

An infinite future?

It will not be humans who witness the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence: it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria. Long before the Sun finally licks Earth’s face clean, post-human intelligence could have spread far beyond its original planet, taking forms that might see the destruction of our Earth as a minor or sentimental matter and still look forward to a longer-range future. The cosmic future extends far beyond the demise of the Sun: the Wider cosmos may have an infinite future ahead of it. We can’t predict what role life will eventually carve out for itself: it could become extinct; on the other hand, it could achieve such dominance that it can influence the entire cosmos.

It will not be humans who witness the Sun’s demise 6 billion years hence: it will be creatures as different from us as we are from bacteria

Such speculations have generally been left to science fiction writers. But scientists can make some tentative ultra-long-range forecasts. The universe seems fated to continue expanding. Energy reserves are finite, and at first sight this might seem to be a basic restriction. But this constraint is actually not fatal. As the universe expands and cools, lower-energy quanta of energy (or, equivalently, radiation at longer and longer wavelengths) can be used to store or transmit information. Just as an infinite series can have a finite sum (for instance, 1 + 1⁄2 + 1⁄4 + . . . = 2), so there is no limit to the amount of information processing that could be achieved with a finite expenditure of energy. Any conceivable form of life would have to keep ever cooler, think ever slower and hibernate for ever longer periods.

Physicists now suspect that atoms don’t live forever. In consequence, long-dead stars and planets will erode away, maybe in a trillion trillion trillion years – the heat generated by particle decay makes each star glow, but as dimly as a domestic heater. Thoughts and memories would only survive beyond this era if downloaded into complicated circuits and magnetic fields in clouds of electrons and positrons – maybe something that would resemble the threatening alien intelligence in The Black Cloud, the first and most imaginative of Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novels, written in the 1950s.¹

The endgame could be spun out for a number of years so large that to write it down you’d need as many zeros as there are atoms in all the galaxies we can see. As Woody Allen once said, ‘Eternity is very long, especially toward the end.’

We can’t predict what role life will eventually carve out for itself: it could become extinct; on the other hand, it could achieve such dominance that it can influence the entire cosmos

Hence, the nature of longevity is change. Darwin himself noted that ‘not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity’. The great biologist Christian de Duve² envisages that:

The tree of life may reach twice its present height . . . This could happen through further growth of the human twig, but it does not have to. There is plenty of time for other twigs to bud and grow, eventually reaching a level much higher than the one we occupy while the human twig withers . . . What will happen depends to some extent on us, since we now have the power of decisively influencing the future of life and humankind on Earth.

Though time slows, evolution is speeding up. In H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine³ the chrononaut gently eased the throttle of his machine forward: ‘Night came like the turning out of a light, and in another moment came tomorrow.’ As he sped up,

the palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness . . . I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the Earth’s fate, watching with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life of the old Earth ebb away.

He encounters an era where the human species has split into two: the effete and infantile Eloi, and the brutish underground Morlocks who operate the factories that make their clothes and goods, but emerge at night to kill and eat them. Finally, he ends up 30 million years hence, in a world where all familiar forms of life have become extinct.

Why the future matters

To a physicist, time is part of the bedrock of reality: a fourth dimension

What happens in far-future aeons may seem blazingly irrelevant to the practicalities of our lives. But the cosmic context is far from irrelevant to the way we perceive our Earth and the fate of humans – indeed it actually strengthens our con

cerns about what happens here and now, because it offers a vision of just how prodigious life’s future potential could be.

In our everyday life, time is a commodity. We gain or lose it; we save or spend it; all too often we merely waste it. But to a physicist, time is part of the bedrock of reality: a fourth dimension. We are used to the three dimensions of space. Three numbers are needed to define a location on Earth: latitude, longitude and elevation. But to specify a ‘happening’ we need a fourth number as well – the number that tells us when the event happens. There is, however, a crucial difference between time and the three spatial dimensions. We can move to left or right, forwards or backwards, up or down. But we are carried relentlessly forward in time. Time machines that allow us to revisit the past are the stuff of fantasy.

My professional interest is in the science of the entire cosmos –I study our environment in the widest conceivable perspective. This might seem an incongruous viewpoint from which to focus on practical terrestrial issues. But a preoccupation with near-infinite spaces doesn’t make cosmologists especially ‘philosophical’ in coping with everyday life; nor are they less engaged with the issues confronting us here on the ground, today and tomorrow. My subjective attitude was better expressed by the mathematician and philosopher Frank Ramsey:⁴

I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does . . . My picture of the world is drawn in perspective, and not like a model drawn to scale. The foreground is occupied by human beings, and the stars are all as small as threepenny bits.

Our normal ‘time horizons’ are of course very limited. Economic decisions generally discount into insignificance what may happen more than 20 years from now: commercial ventures aren’t worthwhile unless they pay off far sooner than that, especially when obsolescence is rapid. Government decisions are often as short-term as the next election. But sometimes – in energy policy, for example – the horizon extends to 50 years.

The debates about global warming that led to the Kyoto Protocol take cognisance of what might happen 100–200 years ahead: the consensus is that governments should take pre-emptive actions now, in the putative interest of our 22nd-century descendants (though whether these actions will actually be implemented is still unclear).

There is just one context where public policy looks even further ahead, not just for hundreds but for thousands of years: the disposal of radioactive waste from nuclear power stations. Some of this waste will remain toxic for thousands of years, and, both in the UK and the US, the specification for underground depositories demands that hazardous materials should remain sealed off – with no leakage via groundwater, or through fissures opened up by earthquakes – for at least 10,000 years.

The prolonged debates on radioactive waste disposal have had at least one benefit: they have generated interest and concern about how our present-day actions resonate through several millennia. These time spans extend far beyond the horizon of most other planners – but they are still infinitesimal compared to the future lifetime of the Earth itself.

Human determinism

Most people nonetheless have little conception or awareness of the far future: humans are often tacitly regarded as the culmination of evolution. Traditional Western culture envisaged a beginning and an end of history, with a constricted time span in between. For centuries there was broad acceptance that Earth had existed for a few thousand years, and that humans had appeared on the scene soon afterwards. Moreover, history was widely believed to have already entered its final millennium. For the 17th-century essayist Sir Thomas Browne, ‘the world itself seems in the wane. A greater part of Time is spun than is to come.’ However, we know differently now.

Technical and environmental change has been accelerating over human history. A Neanderthal woman would have expected her children to live out their days in a similar way to her own generation, as indeed would most humans until medieval times. Substantial progressive change within a single lifetime is a distinctive hallmark of recent centuries: some technologies now advance so fast that all hardware is scrapped (or consigned to museums) within a very few years. Biotechnology is now, quite suddenly, opening up an unprecedented new dimension of change: the biological fundamentals of humanity, essentially unaltered throughout recorded history, could be transformed within a century.

In Wells’s story, it takes 800,000 years for humans to divide into two subspecies – a time span that accords with modern ideas of how long it took for humanity to emerge via natural selection. But in the new century, changes in human bodies and brains won’t be restricted to the pace of Darwinian selection, nor even to that of selective breeding. Genetic engineering and biotechnology, if widely practised, could transmogrify humanity’s physique and mentality far faster than Wells foresaw. Our own species may change and diversify faster than any predecessor – via intelligently controlled modifications, not by natural selection alone. Already we are able to screen for genetic illnesses and select embryos that are free of specific gene mutations.

In the new century, changes in human bodies and brains won’t be restricted to the pace of Darwinian selection

Life beyond Earth

In future centuries, robots and fabricators could pervade the entire Solar System. Whether humans will themselves have joined this diaspora is harder to predict. If they did, communities would develop in a manner that eventually made them quite independent of Earth. Unconstrained by any restrictions, some would surely exploit the full range of genetic techniques and diverge into new species. The diverse physical conditi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Perspectives on time
• 2 Natural clocks
• 3 Too many, too fast?
• 4 Living time
• 5 The arrival of time politics
• 6 Time and money
• 7 Taking people's time seriously
• 8 Ethics in time
• 9 Time and technology
• 10 Conclusion
• Contributors