Getting Comfortable with Deep Time — Marcia Bjornerud

It's hard not to feel insignificant when confronting the vast sweep of Earth's multi-billion-year history and realizing our small part in it. But deep time can be a source of comfort if we open ourselves up to its story.

Watch the full talk here:

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mostly invisible to us.

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud teaches that kind of time literacy. With it, we become at home in the deep past and engaged with the deep future. We learn to “think like a planet.”

The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Our projects include a 10,000 Year Clock, endangered language preservation, thousand year+ data storage, and Long Bets, an arena for accountable predictions.

[shadowraith]

Getting comfortable with deep time is no more or less difficult than getting comfortable with the perceived size of the universe.