EXPANDED PERSPECTIVES ON TIME

In the first episode of the 2014 reboot of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson presented the list above as the sobering ‘long address’ of the human. Often the long view evokes awe-inspiring totality: think of the earliest pictures of earth from space, such as ‘Earthrise’ taken from Apollo 8 in 1968 and the whole-earth photograph ‘Blue Marble’ taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. However, as our view grew more and more distant – relayed from 3.7 billion miles away, for instance, by Voyager 1 in 1990 – our here we are pictures seemed to offer only humbling vantages, perspectives from which we could see that the entirety of everything we care about is contained, as Sagan famously put it, ‘on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’. As is typical in grand reflections on our inconsequence, Sagan's meditation on the Voyager 1 image tacks from the ‘demonstration of the folly of human conceits’ to perhaps the most desperate conceit of second modernity – that we must ‘deal more kindly with one another and […] preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known’. Our long address, while always partly a litany to our expansive technological abilities, is largely a set of directions to humility: we arrive at our contingency and global responsibility by enfolding a decentred humanity in ever-larger totalising frames. Such shifts in perspective are not only about celebrating technological know-how or recognising that everything we've ever known is here. As this chapter will argue, they are sometimes also about rethinking context itself, and not simply in a way that disables shorter durées. To modify an idea popularised by the astronomer Jill Tarter, perhaps the most radical lesson of scoping out is not so much the parochialising of ‘here’ as the presence of other histories ‘out there’, and further, the constitutive entanglement of our present in a wide array of histories right ‘now’ (Plate 8).