About Time

by Adam Frank

  It was time.

  With the mental equivalent of a blink she shut down the implant resting behind her brain’s frontal lobes. The DataStream she had been so deeply immersed in disappeared and it took a minute, as it always did, to get used to real input from her optic nerve. The wall screen told her it was 4:15 p.m. local Mars time. She had been In-World, immersed in the Network for just ten minutes, and yet her internal sense told her it had been hours. The DataStream was always like that. Direct connections to machine time meant her awareness was responding somewhere between femtosecond clock cycles and what her brain’s biology allowed. That was a permanent state for a big chunk of the solar system’s population these days, of course. They lived In-World most of the time, letting wetware and nanotech take care of their bodies. That was too much for her, though.

  Still, she had got a lot done. Most of the homework set was complete. Now she had to get to the tram port to pick up her parents. They were so proud of their physicist-in-training daughter that they’d offered to take her shopping. Fine by her.

  On the walk through the outer dome she was still mulling over the last problem. She had not been able to get the extra dimensions to curl up right. This was basic stuff and the foundation for the entire rest of the year. String Theory 101. The huge extradimensional effects of modified string conformalism had been discovered in orbital colliders back in the 2100s. Now they had been relentlessly exploited in the microhole technologies that powered pretty much everything. She needed to get that problem worked out or she would look pretty stupid and Professor Yin-Paul would not be likely to consider her for his group.

  Outside the dome the stars were becoming brilliant in the darkening, red-tinged Martian sky. In the distance she could make out the lights of the brane generators up on the Tharsis Bulge. That was where her hopes lay. If she made it into Yin-Paul’s group, she’d be doing cosmology as she had always dreamed, probing the Bulk and the other brane that hovered like a ghost right here, just next to her and everyone else. Sometimes in the DataStream when her body seemed so far away she felt like she could almost move into that other, invisible dimension. God, she was so excited.

  Someone bumped up against her and she was knocked out of her reverie. She shuffled along with the crowd to the tram. She didn’t like being with all these people. They could have done all the shopping In-World together, but her parents were so old-school. Still, she was happy to have the time to spend with them.

  STANDING ON EDGE

  Books on cosmology do not usually come with a moral at the end. This one does. Actually, there are two morals braided together, just as the stories of human time and the human imagining of cosmic time have intertwined across fifty thousand years of cultural innovation. We have reached the end of the beginning in more ways than one.

  From the creation of politically charged city-based empires five thousand years ago to the establishment of mercantile factory-based empires two centuries ago, human culture has re-invented itself again and again. The digital world we so quickly assembled in the last four decades has been yet another turning of the creative wheel. At every stage, the invention of a new time has been central to the cultural transformation. The lived day of a Babylonian merchant looked very different from the lived day of the English worker in a textile factory, which is itself so distant from the mobile-phoned, Facebooked, e-calendared days we move through today.

  We have always been inventing new uses for time from our embodied encounters with the raw stuff of the world. Material engagement, the central driver of change, has become more abstract over the past fifty millennia—beginning with the heft of a stone held in a toolmaker’s hands and arriving, most recently, at the computer-controlled, laser-guided etching of circuits onto silicon chips. But even as the distance between raw material and final technological product has increased, the time we live in continues to change.

  Cosmology, our story of time and creation, has changed as well and it has done so in rough synchronization with cultural time. We began in a world where people’s lives were inextricably woven into the fabric of sky, water and animal. Millennia later, humans were no longer part of nature but imagined themselves above the natural, as God supposedly had ordained. The monotheistic cultures, however, still placed human beings at the centre of a multilayered cosmos of angels, stars, planets and Earth. With the birth of modern science (and its Greek emphasis on reason), we became sequentially displaced from the cosmic centre. Now we are but one planet orbiting one star in one galaxy lost in a universe of galaxies so vast as to give new, visceral meanings to the infinite.

  As the narratives changed, cosmic time and its origins changed as well. The human vision of the cosmos shifted back and forth between temporal trajectories first imagined in myths: a universe created, a universe eternal, a universe of cycles. While many of the imagined possibilities for cosmic time have been with us since the distant era of myth, each culture inevitably focused on one or another geometry of time. Neolithic farmers leaned heavily on stories of eternal return and cyclic universes. Christian theologians looked to scripture and its account of God’s creation ex nihilo. With the advent of science, new vocabularies and new demands entered into the play of cosmology creation: gravity, entropy, relativity.

  But always and forever, the creation of cosmological narratives remained married to the creation of human cultures. Human time and cosmic time remained closely linked, and those links were forged in the iron wheels of medieval clocks, the steel boilers of Victorian steam engines, and the silicon chips ticking off clock cycles in our modern-day computers.

  Looking back across fifty thousand years and looking forward to our ever-accelerating future, we stand in a privileged position. We can, at long last, recognize the paired cycles of change in cosmic and human time and ask what they tell us about who we are, what we are and where might we be going. These questions are neither abstract nor inconsequential, for once we recognize the braiding of cosmic and human time we may also recognize the turning point both have reached. In this way, we come to the end of our own beginning as a species.

  The first question we come to arises from the recognition that we have been creating time ever since we began shaping culture. Human time changes from one era to the next and there is nothing God-given or physics-given about the form of time each person is born into. When we teach our children how to read a clock, we are setting them into a specific framework of imagined time. When they enter school and find out that the sixth period is for maths but the seventh is for English they are, once again, being trained to exist within the context of a culturally defined time made real through specific forms of material engagement. By the time we go off to work, we are so deep in this cultural time we can barely see it for what it is—an invention.

  How many of us are happy with the time we have? The acceleration of cultural life through electronically mediated technologies has brought us great boons, but in the rush of e-mails, mobile phone calls, texting and telecommunication we have been pushed to work more, produce more, consume more. And here comes our first moral. By recognizing that we have invented and are re-inventing time, we give ourselves the opportunity to change it yet again.

  There is an urgency to this possibility that goes beyond mere personal choice. The acceleration of time over the last century was a byproduct of a culture fuelled by energy resources that are now clearly reaching their limits. It is ironic that the human story began as a narrative of climate, with our emergence out of the last ice age. Now our rapid exploitation of carbon-intensive petrochemical technologies makes the next step in our story climate-dependent once again. And there can be no doubt that whatever comes next will have to involve new inventions in time.

  Choices are also the issue for the second question arising at the end of our beginning. Cosmology, our scientific narrative of the universe and time, is at its own precipice. The Big Bang as a sudden creation of cosmos and time without a “before” is poised to be swept aside. In its place, a bewildering ar
ray of alternatives has appeared: brane-world cosmologies, eternal inflation, multiverses, string theory landscapes, loop quantum cosmologies. Some of these ideas are more fully developed than others, and many require the addition of bizarre new players on the cosmic stage. The expectation is that ultimately it will be observations and data that decide among these alternatives, but what will count as a definitive test for such a new cosmology? How long will science, and the culture that supports it, wait for an answer?

  More important, how will changes in cosmological conceptions of time parallel or interweave with culture’s temporal innovations? These questions strike at the heart of our understanding of what science does, the nature of the reality it speaks to, and its interaction with human life. Thus emerges the second moral. By recognizing the way culture and its investigations of the cosmos have entwined across history, we see that simple narratives of discovery in the aether of pure thought are rarely accurate. We are poised to put an end to our naive conceptions of culture, science and cosmos, and develop a more nuanced perspective of our ongoing dialogue with the world.

  Thus we end the book with an investigation of two questions that can serve to inform our next steps in both cosmic and human time: how does culture change its time in light of cosmology, and how does cosmology change its time in light of culture?

  THE TYRANNY OF AN EFFICIENT UNIVERSE

  The time we live through today, the time that rules over our lives, rests on a single value: efficiency. Minimizing time spent completing tasks and producing products is the overarching temporal value of modern culture. It shapes the structure of our economics and, in the process, shapes everything from how we eat to how we educate our children. Efficiency is the principal “time invention” of modern Western culture. As Jeremy Rifkin wrote in his book Time Wars,

  With its [efficiency’s] introduction, the modern temporal orientation is complete. Efficiency is both a value and a method. As a value, efficiency becomes the social norm for how all human time should be used. As a method, efficiency becomes the best way to use time to advance the goal of material progress.1

  Efficiency is, according to Rifkin, the maturation of three different cultural innovations: the division of labour, mass production and the principles of scientific management. The division of labour and mass production were both essential facets of the industrial revolution. It was in Ambrose Crowley’s era that the underlying principles for these facets was first articulated. The idea spread rapidly. Clockmakers, for example, recognized that they could produce more timepieces if they divided up workers so that “one man shall make the Wheels, another the Spring, another shall engrave the Dial-plate” and so on, until the entire process was “better and cheaper, than if the whole Work be put upon any one Man”.2 At the dawn of the 1800s, Eli Whitney took the process further with his new “American method” for the production of muskets. Whitney had standard interchangeable parts manufactured separately and then brought them together to be assembled by workers who might have no knowledge of how the parts were fashioned or how to build a musket from scratch.

  Scientific management, the final cornerstone of the industrial pyramid and its new engagement with time, was the brainchild of Fredrick Taylor. Taylor, born in 1856 to a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family, began his career on the shop floor of a hydraulic works company fashioning water pumps. Surveying the activity around him with an engineer’s eye, Taylor came to realize that production could be increased if each “work process” was broken down into its simplest elements, with systematic improvements made to each and every step. But systematic improvement required systematic study. For the rest of his life Taylor developed the principles of “scientifically” dissecting every aspect of work. His goal was to refine and streamline every step and every movement made by workers both on the shop floor and in the office. His efforts reshaped the world. As historian Daniel Bell wrote,

  If any social upheaval can ever be attributed to one man, the logic of efficiency as a mode of life is due to Taylor. . . . With scientific management, as formulated by Taylor in 1895, we pass far beyond the old, rough computations of the division of labor and move into the division of time itself.3

  In slicing human activity into the abstraction of timed actions, Taylor’s weapon was the stopwatch. Every movement was clocked down to fractions of a second and, in this way, was standardized. Opening a folder file drawer: 0.4 minutes. Opening a folder: 0.4 minutes. Closing a drawer: 0.26 minutes. By scheduling the most basic work tasks (in both blue- and white-collar jobs) people were, in effect, having their heads severed from their bodies, as decisions about their movement through time were made for them by “scientific” managers.

  Taylor’s ideas were adopted as the standard across the United States and Europe. Eventually his techniques spread across the world, as the industrial model for life and time became a global model. And Taylor was right. Production could be vastly increased through scientific study, management and analysis. There was a price to be paid for living with this new and more efficient time, however, and it has only been in the last few decades that the bill seems to be coming due for our new planetary culture as a whole.

  The advent of digital technologies, of course, added a new dimension to the ever-expanding universe of efficiency. With machines that move in microseconds or less, the ability to co-ordinate, integrate and track human activity was both expanded and accelerated. Most important, the advent of digital communications technology meant that the separation between work and life was blurred beyond recognition. The BlackBerry quickly became the “CrackBerry” as workers moved into a state of being permanently at work. How many meals, kids’ ballgames or walks in the park have been interrupted with “I just have to take this call” or “I’m just going to answer this text”?

  From fast food for dinner to “quality time” with children, time management by the end of the twentieth century (with a healthy dose of personal information management) had become the aether through which all daily life moved. Everything had been sped up and nearly everyone was feeling the crunch. What we couldn’t see until recently was that behind the acceleration of time was a background of energy and natural resources that could be assumed, or ignored, for only so long.

  The acceleration in global industrial output in the last century was not simply a product of science and technology. What made that science and technology possible was a seemingly endless supply of cheap energy in the form of petrochemicals. So much useful energy can be extracted from a cubic centimetre of oil that virtually no other nonatomic resource can compare. The world’s oil reserves are, essentially, millions of years’ worth of stored solar energy. Oil is ancient vegetation slowly converted into the viscous ooze that now powers every aspect of our culture. Petrochemicals do more than simply heat homes, power cars and transport food. They are food in the sense that fertilizers derived from petroleum drive the world’s prodigious agricultural output. We wear oil in fabrics and it’s in the innumerable plastic products we hold in our hands. Our medicines would be impossible without oil and our digital world of computers could never have been assembled in its absence. In a single century, we have managed to run through a sizeable fraction of that stored energy. We have used it to build a culture that could literally move mountains, raise cities to the sky and give each of us the power of an army of servants to clean our dishes, wash our clothes and prepare our food.

  But the energy we used to build this accelerated world has its limits and its consequences. By most accounts we are close to, or have already passed, the moment of peak oil, when we will be extracting as much of the easy-to-reach cheap oil from the ground per day as we ever will.4 The spigots can be opened no further. Production will inevitably decline, while demand, with China and India already on line, will only increase. The hard-to-reach of oil is still out there to be mined, of course. BP’s infamous Deepwater Horizon deep-sea platform was drilling one mile underwater off the coast of Louisiana in one of these hard-to-reach oilfields when, in the
spring of 2010, the platform exploded. It took months to cap the well at the bottom of the sea and five million barrels of oil were inadvertently pumped into the Gulf of Mexico. From these kinds of deep-water fields to the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, it is becoming painfully clear that getting the hard-to-reach oil carries environmental costs we may not be able to pay.

  But even if we could get at the oil, entropy and the second law of thermodynamics have once again risen to remind us that nothing comes for free. In using up all those million-year-old reservoirs of cheap energy to build our hyperefficient, hyperaccelerated culture, we have altered the Earth’s atmospheric chemistry. Billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide as well as methane and other greenhouse gases have rapidly been added into the air, enhancing its capacity to trap the same solar energy that created the fossil fuels in the first place. Global warming, better described as climate change, is the ongoing consequence.

  While it is impossible to predict the exact extent to which the climate will change, the evidence is overwhelming that it will change. With consequences that will lie between the unlikely poles of “no big deal” and “the end of the world”, human culture will, in the next century, face an uncomfortable and perhaps dangerous journey between the rock of dwindling energy supplies and the hard place of climate change driven by our use of that energy. With the end of cheap energy sources, coupled with other forms of resource depletion such as the escalating global competition for fresh water supplies, we seem on the trajectory to another cultural shift.5 Material engagement, this time in the form of material depletion, will once again be the engine driving the change. Our ability to find new forms of material engagement or re-envision old ones will serve as bedrock for the new institutional facts that we’ll imagine into being through choice or necessity. And, as has happened so many times in the past, we will imagine new forms of time to accompany our new institutions and new material engagements.