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In Blog, Temporalities-Blog

Reading history in wood: how tree rings became an imperial device

susanne quitmann

  
How dendrochronology — the science of reading tree rings — emerged in the early 20th-century American Southwest as a dating tool as well as an instrument of epistemic imperialism that imposed Western timelines onto Indigenous histories.

Trees and history

Trees are the material from which histories are made. Quite literally, they have long supplied the paper on which historical narratives are written (in analogue formats at least). Yet their relationship to history goes much deeper. Trees contain histories. Each year, they add a new ring to their trunks, preserving traces of the past as they grow. In the early 20th century, scientists began to study these rings to learn about the past. By measuring tree rings and comparing their patterns, scientists created long chronological records that stretched centuries — and eventually millennia – into the past. This method, known as dendrochronology, promised to date not only trees but also wooden artefacts with remarkable precision from periods when written sources did not exist. But analysing tree rings required interpretation, and the chronologies built from them were neither natural nor objective. The history of dendrochronology demonstrates that dating methods and temporal scales are powerful epistemological devices that determine what kinds of historical narratives can be constructed. In the early 20th-century, dendrochronology emerged in the United States as a scientific technique as well as a tool of imperial control. It was used to impose a Western timeline onto Indigenous history, reinforcing structures of knowledge and authority.

Fig. 1: Russell Lee, Top of yellow pine tree in Apache National Forest. Navajo County, Arizona (April 1940). Library of Congress: LC-USF34- 035913-D [P&P] LOT 652, https://lccn.loc.gov/2017786031.

Of tree rings and sunspots

To understand how tree rings became historical markers, we need to look back to the surprising origins of dendrochronology. Rather than archaeology or history, it grew out of astronomy.[1] Arizona-based astronomer Andrew E. Douglass was fascinated by sunspots and their potential relationship to our climate. Scientists had long suspected that solar activity might influence weather patterns, but proving such a connection required long records of astronomical and weather data. Here, Douglass was faced with a problem: at the time, meteorological archives for the United States dated back decades, not centuries – insufficient for studying long-term solar cycles. So, Douglass began searching for alternatives, and trees provided a solution. Every year, most trees add a new growth ring to their trunks: light and pale in spring and early summer, dense and dark in late summer and autumn. In years when rainfall is plentiful and conditions are favourable, the rings grow wide. In dry or stressful years, they grow narrow. Because these variations reflect climate conditions, tree rings serve as a natural archive of weather events and climate conditions. By measuring and comparing rings across multiple trees, Douglass could reconstruct sequences of wet and dry years stretching far back into the past.

Fig. 2: Douglass examining a core on Mt Lemmon, Tucson, Arizona in 1946 (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona).

A new scientific discipline

By the mid-1910s, Douglass realised that tree rings might have applications far beyond astronomical research. He first suggested in 1916 that the technique could date archaeological remains.[2] At the time, archaeologists working in the North American Southwest were excavating numerous Indigenous sites but lacked reliable methods to determine their age and their temporal relationship to one another. There were no written chronologies prior to Europeans’ arrival, leaving earlier centuries largely undated.[3] But if wooden beams from archaeological sites contained the same pattern of rings found in living trees, those beams could be dated by matching the patterns. This 'cross-dating' allowed researchers to determine the year (or period, depending on how the wood had been processed) in which the wood had been processed. Over the next 13 years, Douglass, together with anthropologists and archaeologists,  collected wood samples from ancient structures and living trees across the American Southwest. By comparing overlapping patterns from many trees and wooden beams, Douglass gradually assembled a long chronological sequence, a master timeline of ring patterns across the region inhabited by the Hopi. Eventually, this sequence stretched back roughly 2000 years. In 1929, Douglass published his landmark results.[4] For the first time, archaeologists could date wooden samples and relics from sites with remarkable precision. A new scientific discipline was born.

Fig. 3: Andrew E. Douglass, “The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings.” The National Geographic Magazine 56 (1929): 737-70, p. 769.

Fig. 3: Andrew E. Douglass, “The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings.” The National Geographic Magazine 56 (1929): 737-70, p. 769. The term dendrochronology – from the Greek dendron (tree) and chronos (time) – had been formally introduced by Douglass just a year earlier.[5] Over the following decade, the field flourished in the United States (and, at different times, elsewhere[6]). Researchers expanded tree-ring chronologies and applied them to archaeology, climatology and forestry. The rapid growth of the discipline in the USA only slowed as research priorities shifted during the Second World War.[7] By that point, however, the technique had already transformed several scientific disciplines. Even today, dendrochronology remains one of the most accurate dating methods available.[8]

Fig. 4: Research at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research (LTRR) at the University of Arizona, founded by Douglass in 1937, reflects the range of tree-ring research today, contributing to history, climate science, astronomy and more (https://ltrr.arizona.edu/, 18 March 2026; screenshot used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona).

Universal chronology

Dendrochronology reflected modern Western understandings and organisation of time. The 19th century witnessed a dramatic expansion of temporal standardisation. Industrialisation synchronised working hours and schedules. Railroads required standardised timetables to coordinate travel. Telegraph networks enabled real-time communication across and between continents. To make this accelerated long-range travel and communication possible, states standardised time zones, aligning local clocks with global temporal frameworks. Time became precise, measurable and universal (at least on paper).[9] In this context, historians and archaeologists began striving for universal chronologies. Their goal was to align diverse temporal frameworks and forms of historical dating on a single, linear timeline. Dendrochronology offered an ideal tool for this project.

Fig. 5: Ansel Adams, Walpi, Arizona, 1941. National Archives: 519989.

Scientific time and Indigenous histories

Tree-ring dating allowed scholars in the American Southwest to connect pre-Columbian Indigenous history to the chronology of European historiography. This process of alignment was not technical or objective; it reflected deeper assumptions about history, progress and civilisation. Despite their commitment to universal chronologies, early 20th-century scholars did not believe that all societies moved through history at the same pace. Many Western intellectuals subscribed to theories of civilisational evolution, which imagined societies progressing along a developmental path from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilised’. Western industrial societies were considered most advanced, Indigenous peoples behind. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously spoke of the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’.[10] Douglass’s writings occasionally reflected these assumptions. In 1929, he described the builders of the ancient Hopi village of Hano as ‘inseparable from modern Walpi’.[11] Dendrochronology grew out of Western epistemological traditions that privileged quantification, linear time and material evidence. For archaeologists seeking recognition, precise dating methods were invaluable. Tree rings allowed them to convert archaeological remains into the numerical data modern academic culture demanded.[12] By translating Indigenous histories into the Western chronological framework, dendrochronology implicitly privileged scientific time in understanding the past. Jonas Rüegg wrote that ‘chronological time remains just one possible rendering of the relationship between past, present, and future’.[13] Many cultures conceive of time and history differently: through cycles, world-systems, genealogical narratives and spatial metaphors, for example, rather than a sequence of years.[14] Nevertheless, ‘[s]cientific time became a measure of epistemic legitimacy that eventually disempowered socially embedded modalities of historical knowledge’.[15] Western scholars dismissed other knowledge systems.

Fig. 6: Collection of samples at the LTRR (Photograph used with permission of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research, University of Arizona).

Dating as epistemic imperialism

In the American Southwest, this dynamic directly affected Indigenous historical knowledge. Before the precision of dendrochronology, some archaeologists had relied on oral traditions to reconstruct Indigenous histories. For example, Jesse Walter Fewkes, recorded oral narratives of the Hopi in the late 19th century that described historical events such as migrations and village foundations.[16] However, the temporal structures in oral traditions rarely match Western linear chronologies. As dendrochronology emerged in the early 20th century, these differences became increasingly problematic for scholars seeking academic recognition. Fewkes’s research and his evidence, oral traditions, were dismissed as unreliable.[17] Gradually, Indigenous perspectives were discursively marginalised.[18] More than an isolated phenomenon, this was imperial policy. The second half of the 19th century and the early 20th saw the enforced 'assimilation' of Indigenous people by the U.S. government. The past, present and future of Indigenous Americans were to be incorporated in bureaucratic and scientific structures. The U.S. government forced Indigenous children into boarding schools, replaced communal ownership with individual land allotment and took control over archaeological sites.[19] Dendrochronology was embedded in these broader power structures. In the early 20th-century USA, it helped integrate Indigenous history into imperial narratives of time and progress.

Reading trees, writing histories

This epistemic imperialism expanded a particular system of knowledge that marginalises other ways of understanding the world. Tree rings may be natural phenomena, but the meanings derived from them are shaped by interpretation. Historical methods shape what can be discovered and how the past can be imagined. Archaeologists are increasingly aware of the colonial heritage of their discipline, and many try to use more inclusive, reciprocal research models. But the legacy of colonialism and its epistemologies still looms large. In 2001, Larry Zimmermann criticised that archaeologists still practiced a form of ‘scientific colonialism’, extracting research data from Indigenous communities for the colonisers’ profit in the form of scholarly output and academic recognition.[20] George Nicholas and Julie Hollowell have identified ‘lack of standing given to alternative worldviews and ways of meaning-making’ as a major impediment to a postcolonial archaeology.[21] In many Native American cultures, the past is not separate from the present; instead ‘a present past is part of daily life and experience’.[22] In a debate about the use of human remains in archaeological research, Athabascan Ernie Turner explained: ‘Human bones are [not] able to talk to the scientists and leave them information. Culture talks to us and gives us messages from the past. Spiritual communication is not a theory, it is a fact. […] I am not sure what the bones tell of the spiritual beliefs of my people’.[23] The same could be said about trees: trees don’t talk directly to scientists. Dendrochronology is part of a larger story about knowledge, power and the many ways humans make sense of the past, the present and the future. In a way, measuring tree rings tells us more about archaeologists’ scientific culture than about the historical cultures they study. The idea that archaeologists aim at describing an objective, preexisting, completed truth, which is deeply rooted in Western ontology, is yet another instance of epistemic violence. As Zimmerman explained: The past lives in the present for Native American people and does not exist as a separate entity. When archaeologists state that the past is gone, extinct, or lost unless archaeology is done, they send a strong message that Native American people themselves are extinct. Acceptance of the past as archaeologists view it would actually destroy the Native American present.[24] However, attending to Indigenous culture, as Turner suggested, could help us re-read trees and thus re-write history. Not only do many trees have spiritual meaning for the Hopi,[25] but, structurally, trees are also a closer reflection of Indigenous concepts of the past, present and future than of Western concepts of history. A tree’s rings are its present past, not past and dead, but inseparable, living parts of its daily life.

Fig. 7: Pinus ponderosa, Bryce Canyon National Park, Cannonville, UT, USA 2021, photo taken by Caleb Catto, https://www.inaturalist.org/photos/171245457.

[Published 15.9.2026 
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.
For the previous entry in this series on temporal dis:connectivity, click here. To read the introduction to the series, click here.]
[1] Stephen E. Nash, Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914–1950 (Provo: University of Utah Press, 1999). [2] Hans Hermann Rump, Bäume und Zeiten: Eine Geschichte der Jahrringforschung (Berlin: Springer, 2018), 105. [3] Nash, Time, Trees, and Prehistory, ch. 1. [4] Andrew E. Douglass, 'The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings', The National Geographic Magazine  56, 1929. [5] Andrew E. Douglass, Climactic Cycles and Tree Growth: A Study of the Annual Rings of Trees in Relation to Climate and Solar Activity, The Carnegie Institution (Washington, D.C., 1928), 5. [6] See, for example, Staffan Bergwik, 'Synchronizing Nature and Culture: Mediating Time in Geochronology and Dendrochronology, 1900–1945', in Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations, ed. Anders Ekström and Staffan Bergwik (New York: Berghahn, 2022); Linlin Gao et al., 'China's growing relevance in dendrochronology and paleoclimatology', npj Climate Action 4, no. 83 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00294-7. [7] Nash, Time, Trees, and Prehistory, 10. [8] Nash, Time, Trees, and Prehistory, 10. [9] Andreas Eckert, 'Zeit, Arbeit und die Konstruktion von Differenz: Über die koloniale Ordnung in Afrika', Comparativ 10, no. 3 (2000). ; On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Vanessa Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950 (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Sebastian Conrad, '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century', Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018). doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. [10] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8. [11] Douglass, 'The Secret of the Southwest', 744n. [12] Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 780. [13] Jonas Rüegg, 'Oceanic Knowledge and National Space-Time in Pacific History', Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, no. 2 (2024): 111. doi.org/10.1353/VRG.2024.A934657. Emphasis added. [14] On the Hopi concept of history, see Maren P. Hopkins et al., 'Hopi Perspectives on History', in Becoming Hopi, ed. Wesley Bernardini et al. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021). [15] Rüegg, 'Oceanic Knowledge', 111. [16] Wesley Bernardini and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, 'A History of Anthropological Research on the Hopi Mesas', in Becoming Hopi, ed. Wesley Bernardini et al. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021), 81n. [17] Bernardini and Kuwanwisiwma, 'A History of Anthropological Research', 81n. [18] Bernardini and Kuwanwisiwma, 'A History of Anthropological Research', 80n. [19] Saul L. Hedquist et al., 'A Hopi Atlas', in Becoming Hopi, ed. Wesley Bernardini et al. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021), 57n; Bernardini and Kuwanwisiwma, 'A History of Anthropological Research', 83; Tim Holm, The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans & Whites in the Progressive Era (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), ch. 1. [20] Larry J. Zimmerman, 'Usurping Native American Voice', in The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, ed. Tamara Bray (New York: Garland Publishing, 2001), 169. [21] George Nicholas and Julie Hollowell, 'Ethical Challenges to a Postcolonial Archaeology: The Legacy of Scientific Colonialism', in Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, ed. Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 63. [22] Zimmerman, 'Usurping Native American Voice', 173. [23] Patricia J. Carmack, 'The Study of Ancient Human Skeletal Remains in Iowa', Iowa Archaeological Society Newsletter 111 (1984): 8.  From the context, it is clear that, without the added not, Turner was either misquoted or misspoke, which is also supported by Zimmerman, 'Usurping Native American Voice', 173. [24] Zimmerman, 'Usurping Native American Voice', 175. [25] Hedquist et al., 'A Hopi Atlas'.
bibliography
Barak, On. On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Bergwik, Staffan. 'Synchronizing Nature and Culture: Mediating Time in Geochronology and Dendrochronology, 1900–1945'. In Time and the World: Interdisciplinary Studies in Cultural Transformations, edited by Anders Ekström and Staffan Bergwik,  New York: Berghahn, 2022:  230-56. Bernardini, Wesley and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma. 'A History of Anthropological Research on the Hopi Mesas'. In Becoming Hopi, edited by Wesley Bernardini, Stewart B. Koyiyumpetwa, Gregson Schachner and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma,  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021:  73-89. Carmack, Patricia J. 'The Study of Ancient Human Skeletal Remains in Iowa'. Iowa Archaeological Society Newsletter 111 (1984): 7-9. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Conrad, Sebastian. '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century'. Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821-48. doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. Douglass, Andrew E. Climactic Cycles and Tree Growth: A Study of the Annual Rings of Trees in Relation to Climate and Solar Activity. The Carnegie Institution (Washington, D.C.: 1928). ———. 'The Secret of the Southwest Solved by Talkative Tree Rings'. The National Geographic Magazine 56, 1929, 737-70. Eckert, Andreas. 'Zeit, Arbeit und die Konstruktion von Differenz: Über die koloniale Ordnung in Afrika'. Comparativ 10, no. 3 (2000): 61-73. Gao, Linlin, Tatiana Bebchuk, Xiaohua Gou and Ulf Büntgen. 'China's growing relevance in dendrochronology and paleoclimatology'. npj Climate Action 4, no. 83 (2025). doi.org/10.1038/s44168-025-00294-7. Hedquist, Saul L., Maren P. Hopkins, Stewart B. Koyiyumpetwa and T.J. Ferguson. 'A Hopi Atlas'. In Becoming Hopi, edited by Wesley Bernardini, Stewart B. Koyiyumpetwa, Gregson Schachner and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma,  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021:  27-71. Holm, Tim. The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs: Native Americans & Whites in the Progressive Era. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Hopkins, Maren P., Leigh Kuwanwisiwma, Stewart B. Koyiyumpetewa and Wesley Bernardini. 'Hopi Perspectives on History'. In Becoming Hopi, edited by Wesley Bernardini, Stewart B. Koyiyumpetewa, Gregson Schachner and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma,  Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021:  15-26. Nash, Stephen E. Time, Trees, and Prehistory: Tree-Ring Dating and the Development of North American Archaeology, 1914–1950. Provo: University of Utah Press, 1999. Nicholas, George and Julie Hollowell. 'Ethical Challenges to a Postcolonial Archaeology: The Legacy of Scientific Colonialism'. In Archaeology and Capitalism: From Ethics to Politics, edited by Yannis Hamilakis and Philip Duke,  Abingdon: Routledge, 2007:  59-82. Ogle, Vanessa. The Global Transformation of Time, 1870-1950. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Osterhammel, Jürgen. The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Rüegg, Jonas. 'Oceanic Knowledge and National Space-Time in Pacific History'. Verge: Studies in Global Asias 10, no. 2 (2024): 111-37. doi.org/10.1353/VRG.2024.A934657. Rump, Hans Hermann. Bäume und Zeiten: Eine Geschichte der Jahrringforschung. Berlin: Springer, 2018. Zimmerman, Larry J. 'Usurping Native American Voice'. In The Future of the Past: Archaeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, edited by Tamara Bray,  New York: Garland Publishing, 2001: 169-184. Continue Reading
15 September 2026
In Blog, Temporalities-Blog

Elsewhere, elsewhen: planetary analogues as time machines

clemens finkelstein
Summary: From a dynamited Arizona cinder field to a sealed Houston habitat, planetary analogue sites manufacture time, suppressing Indigenous histories to rehearse speculative futures in a revealing act of temporal asymmetry.

Fig. 1: USGS Astrogeology team blasting craters at Cinder Lake, outside Flagstaff, Arizona to mock up a section of the Moon’s Sea of Tranquillity. (1968, USGS, public domain).

Cratering the present

From 1967 to 1968, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) dynamited a corner of Arizona into the Moon (Fig. 1). Between 28-31 July 1967, on a black cinder field northeast of Flagstaff, engineers buried hundreds of explosive charges and detonated them in carefully staged sequences, excavating 47 craters whose sizes and positions replicated, at a 1:1 scale, a patch of the Sea of Tranquillity recently photographed by NASA’s Lunar Orbiter programme (1966-1967) to select the most suitable landing site for Apollo 11 in 1969 (Figs. 2-3). A second round that October brought the count to 143 craters, and, in 1968, a larger field of several hundred craters was blasted nearby.[1] The detonations were layered in time as well as space: astrogeologically determined ‘old’ craters were blasted first, then partially buried; ‘intermediate’ and ‘young’ craters followed, so that the finished field would display a fabricated stratigraphy.[2] Millions of years of meteorite bombardment were compressed into a few days of anthropogenic demolition work. Astronauts in pressure suits then trudged across the Cinder Lake Crater Field, rehearsing traverses they would later perform 250,000 miles (400,000 km) away.

Fig. 2-3: Left: Cinder Lake Crater Field #2 (1968, USGS public domain). Right: Sea of Tranquillity, Apollo 10 oblique view of the western portion, NASA ID: as10-29-4321 (1969, NASA JSC, public domain).

Cinder Lake is an early and unusually literal specimen of a now-global practice: the planetary analogue. Planetary analogues are sites on Earth that are made to stand in for extraterrestrial environments such as the Moon, Mars and the icy moons of the outer planets. Some of these surrogate sites may be found in deserts, lava fields and meteorite-impact craters, or in polar deserts whose geology or chemistry resembles that of another world, enabling scientists to test instruments and rehearse the search for extraterrestrial life. Others are built as sealed habitats and isolation chambers in which crews experience the confinement of voyages that have yet to leave Earth. Either way, the scientific literature treats the analogue predominantly as a spatial surrogate: a stand-in for somewhere else.[3] But look again at what the engineers produced at Cinder Lake. Beyond just a model of a place, they built a model of its environmental history. The craters were blasted in sequence to fake a stratigraphy, old before young, so that the field would read as the outcome of an aeon of meteorite bombardment. They forged a temporal order as much as a geographical one. The spatiotemporal forgery even demanded a second – quieter yet no less violent – operation that erased the Indigenous communities that had once inhabited these lands and whose oral traditions still carry the story of the 11th-century eruption of Sunset Crater Volcano that buried the basin in the black cinders the USGS would one day blast into a replica Moon.[4] They and their descendants then had to be subtracted so that another world’s deep past could take their place. The site gave up – or more accurately, was made to give up – its own time to host another world’s. This is the structural pattern I want to track here. Planetary analogues are not, in the end, merely machines for simulating space; they are machines for constructing time. Each one repeats the same three operations visible at Cinder Lake: import an alien past, rehearse a speculative future and suppress the local present that stands in its way. Further, these operations run essentially in one direction. The terrestrial site gives; the planetary referent takes; nothing returns. Whereas discussions of the analogue trade chiefly on its spatial symmetry, I want to trace its temporal asymmetry to read planetary analogues as time machines obscured by staging visual resemblance.

Fig. 4: Finding a gypsum deposit at Gemini Hills in the Haughton Impact Crater (20 July 2009, Brian Shiro, public domain).

Elsewhere: the allotopic environment

When astrogeologists study the Haughton impact crater on Devon Island or the hyperarid soils of Chile’s Atacama as proxies for Mars, the claim is as temporal as it is spatial (Fig. 4). Once upon a time, roughly four billion years ago, Mars, the reasoning runs, contained liquid water, a denser atmosphere and perhaps the conditions for life. Earth retains environments that resemble the vanished Martian world. The analogue site therefore functions as a window looking both onto another place as well as that distant planet’s past, a fragment of alien deep time conveniently preserved in our own backyard.[5] This is a remarkable historiographical manoeuvre in which analogue scientists play historian. They select a surviving trace, argue for its representativeness and use it to reconstruct an inaccessible elsewhen. The difference, however, is one of scale and direction. Where the historian reads a 16th-century notarial register as a trace of its own past, the analogue scientist reads a Devonian lakebed as a trace of somewhere else’s. A past belonging to a different world entirely. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the recent planetary turn obliges historians to think human-scale and geological-scale time together.[6] The analogue radicalises that demand. It asks us to braid Earth’s geological time with that of another planet at a single terrestrial site. The analogue relation draws temporal meaning out of the terrestrial site and exports it elsewhere.

Fig. 5: Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) with associated infrastructure and barren landscape on Tallurutit Devon Island (17 July 2013, Joseph Palaia, public domain).

Elsewhen: the allochronic environment

In 1983, the anthropologist Johannes Fabian published a critique that stung. Time and the Other argued that Western anthropology systematically denied coevalness to the peoples it studied. Fieldwork demanded shared time – sitting, talking and eating in a common present – yet the resulting monographs cast their subjects as primitive, traditional and premodern inhabitants of an earlier epoch. Fabian named this discursive expulsion from the shared present allochronism: the Other was not merely elsewhere; the Other was elsewhen.[7] What happens when we extend Fabian’s critique from peoples to places? Consider Devon Island. To the Inuit of Nunavut, it is Tallurutit (Inuktitut: ᑕᓪᓗᕈᑎᑦ), a name said to liken the streaks across the island’s landscape to the tattooed lines of Inuit women’s chins. In English-language reference works, it is the world’s largest uninhabited island, a polar desert in the Canadian High Arctic. Uninhabited is doing suspicious work in the preceding sentence. Archaeological traces of human presence on the island reach back about 4000 years. At Dundas Harbour, the stone remains of a Thule settlement some thousand years old sit within walking distance of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost established in 1924 to assert Arctic sovereignty. A post sustained in the 1930s by Inuit families relocated, disastrously, from Baffin Island, and abandoned in 1951.[8] The island holds these histories in its permafrost. Yet since 1997, it has been something else: Mars. The NASA Haughton–Mars Project (HMP) operates from the rim of a 23-kilometre impact crater punched into the island around 31 million years ago. For several million years thereafter, the crater held a lake, ringed by boreal forest and home to early seal relatives.[9] Now cold, dry, rocky, windswept and barely vegetated, the crater is routinely described as one of the most Mars-like places on Earth (Fig. 5). Analogue astronauts rehearse spacewalks across its floor, and a winding gully has even been rechristened Astronaut Canyon.[10] For the analogue to function, Devon Island’s own time must be evacuated: 4000 years of Inuit and pre-Inuit presence, the colonial archive of the RCMP post, the living political present of Nunavut. All of it becomes static in the signal. The landscape, instead, is recast as pre-human. A ready-made fragment of Mars, which is to say, of a world where (human) history has never happened. This is allochronism applied to terrain. Where Fabian’s anthropologists consigned living peoples to the past, the analogue consigns storied landscapes to a condition outside terrestrial history altogether, so that they may serve as blank pages for an extraterrestrial narrative. And here the temporal asymmetry bites hardest, because the exchange is lopsided. Devon Island lends Mars its surface, its light, its loneliness; in return, it is given a description – uninhabited, barren, Martian – that quietly overwrites everyone who has ever lived there. The island is a palimpsest thick with inscribed time. A single sweep of the eyes across that crater encompasses the Oligocene impact, the Miocene lake, the thousand-year-old Thule dwelling, the abandoned colonial post and the rehearsed Martian future. None of them is synchronous with the others; all of them are present at once. This is a condition that the historian Reinhart Koselleck describes as ‘the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous’, in which every place is a sediment of layered, non-simultaneous times.[11] The analogue site is perhaps the purest laboratory specimen exemplifying his insight. Miocene crater, Thule ruin, colonial outpost and rehearsed Martian future stacked in a single field of view. The planetary analogue, however, unlike the historian, acknowledges only one layer and relegates the rest to a state of interference.

Chronotechnics

So far, the analogue has trafficked in pasts both borrowed and buried. Its third temporal commodity is futurity, where architecture takes over from geology. At the Johnson Space Center in Houston stands Mars Dune Alpha, a habitat of roughly 160-square-metres designed by BIG–Bjarke Ingels Group and 3D-printed by ICON from a concrete-like material, in which successive volunteer crews of NASA’s Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) programme have lived for 378 days at a stretch, pretending to be on Mars (Fig. 6). The pretence is built, not merely imagined, and what is built is mostly time. Programmable lighting manufactures a day where the Texan sun is sealed out. Communications with the outside world are artificially delayed by up to 22 minutes each way, because that is how long radio signals take to crawl between Mars and Earth. Astronomical distance is simulated through the medium of time. Even the floor plan stages temporality, grading the interior from private sleeping quarters through shared galley to workstations: personal time, social time, mission time. All these temporal dimensions are zoned in plywood and printed concrete. I want to call such infrastructural enactment a chronotechnics: an architecture whose primary product is a temporal regime.[12] The planetary analogue thus joins a long lineage from the medieval monastery that disciplined the day into liturgical hours to the industrial factory that disciplined it into shifts to the prison that made timetables into walls.[13] The analogue habitat, however, adds a twist none of its forebears attempted in that the time it imposes does not yet exist. The monastery enforced religious time and the factory that of capitalism, both times of the present. Mars Dune Alpha enforces the daily rhythm of a Martian settlement that has never been built, may never be built, and whose actual texture nobody can know for certain. Its inhabitants live inside an architectural conjecture: Ernst Bloch’s ‘not-yet’ (Noch-Nicht) poured in concrete.[14] The deepest confirmation that the planetary analogue’s medium is time came from an experiment that abolished landscape entirely. Mars-500 locked six male participants inside a modular, windowless complex on the outskirts of Moscow for 520 days, from 2010 to 2011, to simulate a round trip to Mars. The study was conducted by the Institute of Biomedical Problems (IBMP) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA). There was no red sand standing in for Martian regolith, no horizon, nothing Mars-like in sight. What the crew endured instead was pure duration: the transit time, the communication lag, the slow accumulation of confinement and isolation. Strip away the scenery and the simulation loses nothing essential, because the scenery was never the point. You can simulate Mars without reproducing a single square metre of its surface. You cannot simulate it without reproducing its time. There is a paradox coiled inside all this rehearsal, and the historical theorist Zoltán Boldizsár Simon has devoted several books to its components. His early account of the unprecedented sets the trap: the planetary analogue exists to prepare for an event whose defining property is that nothing can prepare for it.[15] A first descent onto Mars would be, in his terms, a rupture without precedent. And rehearsing the unprecedented seems a contradiction. The analogue manages the contradiction by manufacturing precedents: by generating, in the present, a synthetic past for a future that has not happened. Simon’s more recent work suggests why this is more than a curiosity of spaceflight. In The Fabric of Historical Time (2023), written with Marek Tamm, the authors distinguish temporality from historicity and describe historical time as a fabric in which many temporalities and historicities coexist, overlap and clash rather than a single trajectory.[16] The analogue site is a place where that fabric is deliberately torn: a single thread of it, the speculative Martian future, is drawn forward while the rest are cut away. In Plurihistoricity (2025), Simon fittingly argues that contemporary societies no longer inhabit one shared regime of historical change but several conflicting regimes at once, among which he counts the technological dream of expansion into space alongside the prospect of extinction and the unfinished reckoning with colonial injustice.[17] The planetary analogue is where two such regimes meet on the same ground: the colonial pattern of clearing land of its inhabitants, now performed in the service of a spacefaring future.[18] Devon Island and the Cinder Lake fields are more than mere simulations of other worlds; they are sites where incompatible histories are forced into a single plot. This is why the rehearsal leaves a residue in the participants. When the first crew someday descends to the actual Martian surface, they will meet it partly as a repetition of Devon Island, of the Atacama, of a dynamited cinder field in Arizona. The pre-furnishing is not only institutional but felt. Reflecting on the halfway point of being sealed inside Mars Dune Alpha for a year, the CHAPEA commander Kelly Haston remarked: ‘I actually apparently really love being on Mars’.[19] The hedge in that sentence — ‘apparently really’ — registers the strangeness by which an affection is borne for a Mars one has never visited (and may never), through a place that is, essentially, a printed sandbox in Houston. This is what the planetary analogue finally produces. More than anticipating the future, it pre-furnishes the future with memories of surrogate experiences.

Fig. 6: Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog (CHAPEA) habitat at NASA Johnson Space Center; 360-degree view of the ‘sandbox’ outside the habitat, used for simulated extravehicular activities (Image: Bill Stafford/NASA, public domain)

Temporal asymmetry: a preliminary sketch

The concept of temporal asymmetry is established in the philosophy of physics, where it denotes the structural differences between our relations to the past and the future: we remember one but not the other, causes precede effects, and entropy increases.[20] In historical theory, the phrase appears only fleetingly, and the relation I give it – a lateral, unidirectional transfer of temporal identity between places – has not, to my knowledge, been isolated as such.[21] In the above sketch of temporal asymmetry produced by planetary analogues, a site is conscripted to carry another’s past or future; traffic runs in one direction, and the subordinate site pays for the privilege by suppressing its own historical time. Elsewhere is made to stand for elsewhen. So why should historians care about a concept distilled from such a peculiar practice? Because the planetary analogue is a diagnostic caricature of the historical method. Every act of historical comparison performs a miniature analogue operation. Periodisation, comparison, and the denial of coevalness are all temporal transfers, and most are asymmetric. The planetary analogue simply performs the transfer with bulldozers and dynamite at a scale and literality that make the operation impossible to overlook. It is a temporal machine twice over: a machine that manufactures time for its users and a machine that reveals to attentive historians the time-manufacturing embedded in our own most routine procedures. The analogue does to a cinder field what every history does to its sources; it simply leaves the evidence lying in the open. That visibility comes with an obligation that the concept must confront. If temporal asymmetry names a unidirectional transfer in time, then an analysis content to describe it from the outside risks reproducing the trajectory it set out to critique: narrating other places’ conscription in the same extractive grammar that it diagnoses. Whether temporal asymmetry can be thought from elsewhere, through epistemologies of time other than the Western historicist approach this sketch has assumed, is the question on which its critical purchase ultimately depends.[22] I am unable to settle this here. Nevertheless, the planetary analogue itself offers a clue, because the asymmetry it enacts is never complete. Somewhere northeast of Flagstaff, the craters blasted in 1967 and 1968 to rehearse the 1969 Moon landing are still faintly visible, softened by half a century of Arizona weather (Fig.7). A fake lunar landscape slowly becoming an authentic Earthly ruin, acquiring at last a past that is genuinely its own. Landscapes, it turns out, may resist permanent conscription into other worlds’ chronologies. Histories seep back. If the planetary analogue is a machine for sending places elsewhere in time, then the task it sets the historian is to tend the seepage, and to restore coevalness to the places we sent elsewhen.

Fig. 7: Cinder Lake with San Francisco Mountain and adjoining neighbourhoods, Coconino County, Arizona (John Mason, USGS, March 2011, public domain).

[Published 21.7.2026 
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.
For the previous entry in this series on temporal dis:connectivity, click here. To read the introduction to the series, click here.]
[1] On the construction and crater counts, see 'Cinder Lakes Apollo Training Area History', Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, 2026, accessed 24 June 2026, https://www.fs.usda.gov/r03/coconino/recreation/discover-history/cinder-lakes-apollo-training-area-history; R. Greg Vaughan et al., Walk in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts: a field guide to northern Arizona astronaut training sites, ed. Philip A. Pearthree, vol. 55, Field Guide, (Boulder: Geological Society of America, 2019). [2] Paul Sweitzer, Paul Sweitzer Collection (Flagstaff: Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, 1979), NAU.PH.426. [3] See F. Foucher et al., 'Definition and use of functional analogues in planetary exploration', Planetary and Space Science 197, no. 105162 (2021) 10.1016/j.pss.2021.10516; Louisa J. Preston and Lewis R. Dartnell, 'Planetary habitability: lessons learned from terrestrial analogues', International Journal of Astrobiology 13, no. 1 (2014); Richard Léveillé, 'A half-century of terrestrial analog studies: from craters on the Moon to searching for life on Mars', Planetary and Space Science 58, no. 4 (2010); Sheryl L. Bishop, 'From Earth Analogues to Space: Learning How to Boldly Go', in On Orbit and Beyond: Psychological Perspectives on Human Spaceflight, ed. Douglas A. Vakoch (Berlin: Springer, 2013). [4] Mark D. Elson, ed., Sunset Crater Archaeology: The History of a Volcanic Landscape, vol. 37, Anthropological Papers (Tucson: Center for Desert Archaeology, 2011). See also Fernando Armstrong-Fumero and Julio Hoil Gutierrez, eds., Legacies of Space and Intangible Heritage: Archaeology, Ethnohistory, and the Politics of Cultural Continuity in the Americas (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2017). [5] See Rafael Navarro-González et al., 'Mars-Like Soils in the Atacama Desert, Chile, and the Dry Limit of Microbial Life', Science 302, no. 5647 (2003). [6] Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021). [7] Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). For a critique that extends and complicates Fabian’s argument, see Kevin Birth, 'The creation of coevalness and the danger of homochromism', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 24, no. 1 (2008). [8] Shelagh D. Grant, Polar imperative: a history of Arctic sovereignty in North America (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2010). [9] Natalia Rybczynski, Mary R. Dawson and Richard H. Tedford, 'A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia', Nature 458, no. 7241 (2009). [10] Pascal Lee, 'Mars on Earth: The NASA Haughton-Mars Project', Ad Astra May-June (2002). [11] Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. Sean Franzel and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018). [12] On Chronotechik (chronotechnique), see Wolfgang Ernst, Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media, trans. Anthony Enns (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). [13] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977). Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004). [14] Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1995). See also Alexander C.T. Geppert and Tilmann Siebeneichner, '"Lieux de l’avenir". Zur Lokalgeschichte des Weltraumdenkens', Technikgeschichte 84, no. 4 (2017). [15] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, History in Times of Unprecedented Change: A Theory for the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). [16] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, The Fabric of Historical Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). [17] Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Plurihistoricity: On the Historical Cultures of Extinction, Justice and the Historical Profession (London: Routledge, 2025). [18] See Katherine G. Sammler and Casey R. Lynch, 'Apparatuses of observation and occupation: settler colonialism and space science in Hawai’i', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39, no. 5 (2021) doi.org/10.1177/02637758211042374. [19] Elisha Sauers, 'This NASA crew has survived Mars for six months — sort of', Mashable, 30 December 2024, https://mashable.com/article/nasa-chapea-mars-crew, last accessed: 24 June 2026. [20] Paul Horwich, Asymmetries in Time: Problems in the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1987). [21] The phrase surfaces in discussions of Arthur C. Danto’s narrative sentences and of the gap between agents’ forward-looking uncertainty and historians’ retrospective knowledge. See Jonas Grethlein, Experience and Teleology in Ancient Historiography: Futures Past from Herodotus to Augustine, trans. Experience and Teleology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). [22] See Nancy D. Munn, 'The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay', Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992) doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.000521.

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Forest Service, US Department of Agriculture, 2026, accessed 24 June 2026, https://www.fs.usda.gov/r03/coconino/recreation/discover-history/cinder-lakes-apollo-training-area-history. Elson, Mark D., ed. Sunset Crater Archaeology: The History of a Volcanic Landscape Vol. 37, Anthropological Papers. Tucson: Center for Desert Archaeology, 2011. Ernst, Wolfgang. Chronopoetics: The Temporal Being and Operativity of Technological Media. Translated by Anthony Enns. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Foucher, F., K. Hickman-Lewis, A. Hutzler, K.H. Joy, L. Folco, J.C. Bridges, P. Wozniakiewicz, et al. 'Definition and use of functional analogues in planetary exploration'. 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Flagstaff: Cline Library, Northern Arizona University, 1979. NAU.PH.426. Vaughan, R. Greg, Kevin Schindler, Jeanne Stevens and Ian Hough. Walk in the footsteps of the Apollo astronauts: a field guide to northern Arizona astronaut training sites. Field Guide. Edited by Philip A. Pearthree. Vol. 55, Boulder: Geological Society of America, 2019.   Continue Reading
21 July 2026
In Blog, Temporalities-Blog

Dreaming in millennia: longtermism and the problem of temporal dis:connectivity

roland wenzlhuemer

[Summary: Longtermism's moral arithmetic promises to safeguard humanity's distant future, but its inability to bridge the gap between present action and millennia-long consequences reveals a profound temporal dis:connectivity with troubling political and ethical implications.]

The longtermist wager

Consider a decision about where to donate money. One option saves several hundred lives in the coming year through the distribution of anti-malarial mosquito nets in sub-Saharan Africa, an established and relatively effective way to save lives. Another option funds research into artificial-intelligence safety to keep future AI systems from dominating or even exterminating humanity. The second option saves no one today. Its effects, if any, will be felt across civilisational timescales. Expected utility, however, demands the second option. Overwhelmingly. If even a small reduction in the probability of an AI-induced catastrophe affects a fraction of our descendants into the deep future, the arithmetic reduces every near-term intervention to insignificance.[1] Nick Bostrom made the longtermist logic explicit: ‘the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one billionth of one billionth of one percentage point is worth a hundred billion times as much as a billion human lives’.[2]

Fig. 1: The centre of longtermists' moral attention (Image: MHoltsmeier)

This is the core wager of longtermism:[3] the moral weight of the future is so vast that it should dominate our ethical calculus today. It is an idea that has migrated from speculative philosophy into philanthropic strategy, technology ethics and — with increasing self-confidence — into the governance of artificial intelligence. Yet longtermism is also a doctrine defined by a profound temporal dis:connectivity: a simultaneous insistence on connection to a distant future and a structural inability to bridge the gap it invokes. Longtermism holds that the most important feature of our actions today is their impact on the far future, meaning at least millennia, if not aeons. One of its most influential philosophical statements is the ‘case for strong longtermism’, which argues that in the most significant decisions facing agents today, every option that is best overall is best because of its effects on the far future and its benefits there dwarf anything achievable in the near term.[4] The argument rests on several premises. For the current purposes, I will concentrate on only three, leaving aside prerequisite convictions such as the idea that the survival and expansion of humanity over the coming millennia is of universal value or that current suffering and supposed future wellbeing can be compared at all. First, demography: the expected number of future human or human-like beings is astronomically large. Even on conservative assumptions – an Earth-bound civilisation without digital sentience – the number of future people runs into hundreds of trillions. On permissive assumptions involving space colonisation and digital minds, Bostrom estimates lower bounds of 1034 to 1054 subjective life-years to be lived in the future.[5] Second, morality: temporal distance is morally irrelevant – the wellbeing of a person in the far future counts as much as that of a person today. Third, causality: we can meaningfully influence this enormous future today, most importantly by reducing the risk of existential catastrophe. This third premise builds directly on Bostrom’s foundational 2013 paper, which established existential risks, understood as threats to the existence of Earth-originating intelligent life or the destruction of its potential for desirable development – as a morally distinct category requiring absolute priority.[6] His maxipok principle (maximise the probability of an OK outcome, where an OK outcome avoids existential catastrophe), translates this logic into guidance. The implication is stark: ‘If benefiting humanity by increasing existential safety achieves expected good on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than that of alternative contributions, we would do well to focus on this most efficient philanthropy’.[7]

Hari Seldon’s problem

Longtermism thus appears as a radical but rational reorientation of moral priority. It asks us to look past the child who will die tonight of a preventable disease and the community devastated by famine towards a future so remote that it can only be grasped in statistical abstractions. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is a science fiction classic from the 1950s, which was recently revived as an Apple TV series. It builds on mathematician Hari Seldon devising psychohistory, a science that treats human civilisation as an aggregate statistical system and predicts the arc of events across millennia.[8] By way of psychohistorical prognosis, Seldon knows that the Galactic Empire will fall and a dark age of 30,000 years will follow, but he also knows that careful intervention can shorten that period to a mere 1000 years. Hence, he founds the Foundation, trusting that the causal machinery of history will continue his plan long after his death.

Fig. 2: Hari Seldon, the fictional prophet of longtermism (Image by Vishchun)

Psychohistory is an exhilarating idea. It is also, as Asimov’s narrative demonstrates, a fantasy. The plan works only because Asimov grants Seldon’s equations predictive power that no real science of history possesses. The Foundation’s plans are repeatedly disrupted by individuals whose actions deviate from the statistical model. The whole apparatus depends on assumptions that collapse the moment they are interrogated: that the future is legible from the present, that causal chains can be traced reliably across millennia, that knowledge of the far future is, in principle, available to us. They make psychohistory more a reductio ad absurdum than a flattering analogy. Yet, longtermism makes precisely these assumptions.

Where the connection breaks

The idea of dis:connectivity challenges binary thinking about global processes. It holds that connections and disconnections – interruptions, detours, absences, resistances – are not opposites but co-constitutive elements of how globalisation works.[9] Applied temporally, the concept draws attention to how the relationship between past, present and future by continuity as well as rupture and the tension between them, by the moments when the thread tears, when projections diverge from occurrences. Longtermism invites exactly this analysis. It asserts powerful causal and moral connections between our present choices and the lives of people centuries hence. But this connective thread is frayed at every joint. The temporal dis:connectivity of longtermism displays many facets, and they compound each other. Hence, longtermism faces a cluster of interlocking objections that collectively undermine its claim to guide present action.

Fig. 3: Continuing a long tradition of imagining the future as woven threads (Image: A Golden Thread by John Mulhuish Strudwick)

The longtermist case rests on calculations that have the air of analytical rigour while resting on speculative foundations. Estimates of existential risk, future population sizes and the value of additional centuries of human existence are multiplied to yield astronomical numbers, yet each variable is extrapolated from limited historical experience and scaled across timescales for which no empirical basis exists. The procedure resembles the Drake equation in its formal elegance as well as its epistemic emptiness. The Drake equation estimates the number of communicating civilisations in the galaxy by multiplying several factors: the rate of star formation, the fraction with planets, the fraction of those capable of supporting life and so on. The result looks like a calculation. But almost every variable is either unknown or inferred from an n=1 sample: the Earth. The equation generates no knowledge; it structures ignorance so that it resembles knowledge. Longtermist arithmetic works in precisely the same way. The probability of existential catastrophe this century, the size of the future population, the causal efficacy of present interventions across millennial timescales — none of these can be grounded in anything more secure than informed speculation. Multiplied together, they produce numbers of compelling precision. But such seeming precision derives from the mathematical operation, not from the underlying speculations. Even granting that present actions can shape the distant future, our ability to predict how degrades rapidly with temporal distance. Drawing on chaos theory, Askell and Neth show that past conditions in complex dynamic systems become ever more irrelevant to remote future states,[10] which means that even an agent who assigns no special priority to the present has strong reasons to focus on near-term consequences, simply because those are the ones she can actually estimate. Thorstad sharpens this point further: the longtermist case that the astronomical value of future lives necessitates (and justifies) immediate action depends on the unsupported assumption that existential risk is currently very high but will soon drop to negligible levels.[11] He argues that if the risk of human extinction persists for a very long time, expected future benefits shrink dramatically, and none of the arguments offered in their support – human wisdom, economic growth, space settlement – proves convincing. There is, finally, a fundamental problem that the longtermist literature largely passes over. Longtermism does not merely claim that future people matter; it claims that we can identify, from our vantage point, what will constitute a good life for them. But our conception of human flourishing is itself historically contingent and continuously evolving. The history of moral thought offers little support for the assumption that the values we hold today will be recognisable, let alone authoritative, across millennia. To shape the far future according to present notions of the good compounds rather than dissolves the problem of dis:connectivity at the heart of the longtermist project. Taken together, these issues reveal a tension inherent in the longtermist project: temporal dis:connectivity in a precise sense. Longtermism insists on connectivity, on the causal and moral thread linking present action to distant futures. The causal connecitivity, however, cannot be validated, and even its most careful proponents acknowledge its deep uncertainty. Not only do we lack information about the future, but the connection longtermism asserts is constituted by the very breaks and absences it cannot acknowledge. The causal chain is frayed; epistemic access is blocked; the moral framework is contested; structural expectations are underdetermined. And yet the longtermist must assert all of these to get the argument off the ground. One might object that uncertainty is no reason to abandon the effort. All consequentialist reasoning involves uncertainty; that is what expected-value calculations are for. But the dis:connectivity leads to structural uncertainty that cannot be reduced by gathering more information, because information becomes less available in principle the further forward we project. And it is asymmetric: the astronomical stakes that longtermism invokes are only compelling to those who accept a specific set of speculative assumptions.

Moral arithmetic and its consequences

These philosophical tensions might remain abstract if longtermism were merely a position in academic ethics. But the moral arithmetic of existential risk, once it acquires institutional momentum, generates consequences that deserve scrutiny. Consider how longtermist logic devalues present life. Compared to longtermism’s hypothetical future, current catastrophes seem statistically irrelevant. Bostrom described the two world wars, AIDS and the Chernobyl disaster as ‘mere ripples on the surface of the great sea of life’ from a cosmic perspective.[12] The political consequences of this stance are worrying. In his dissertation, Nick Beckstead argued that saving lives in poor countries deserves less priority than protecting lives in rich countries because the latter have greater leverage on the long-term future.[13] Toby Ord writes that although it is sometimes difficult to believe in view of the many ‘setbacks and exceptions’, ‘[y]et at the largest scales of human history, where we see not the rise and fall of each empire, but the changing face of human civilisation across the entire globe, the trends toward progress are clear’.[14] Thus, past and present suffering disappears in the noise of the large scale and is overshadowed by the looming future. The implications extend further still. Bostrom’s 2019 paper on the vulnerable world hypothesis argues that guarding civilisation against technological catastrophe through ‘black ball’ technologies (i.e. technologies that make it easy for individuals to build weapons of mass destruction, e.g. bio-engineered viruses and home-made nuclear devices) might require, and thereby implicitly justify, expanding preventive policing and global surveillance.[15] The logic is consistent: if the alternative is existential catastrophe costing 10⁵⁴ life-years, almost any present-day constraint on liberty becomes negotiable. The longtermist framework not merely neglects the present; it casually justifies overriding it. Elizabeth C. Hupfer has shown that this logic is not accidental to extreme longtermism. Her Far-Future Priority Objection demonstrates that even weaker formulations, combined with the effective-altruist framework of importance, tractability and neglectedness, inevitably collapse into prioritising the far future, engendering systemic neglect of near-future people in the most need. In a world of scarce resources, longtermism ‘may result in the global affluent turning their backs on these populations’.[16] Alex McLaughlin, approaching longtermism from political philosophy, identifies a structural tension at the heart of the movement’s politics. Despite presenting itself as above political cleavages, longtermism is underpinned by strong, controversial, ‘elusive and unattractive’ politics.[17] Longtermists invoke political authority and institutions when these serve their agenda, while treating democratic contestation as an obstacle to the long-range thinking they prefer.

When the guardians of the future design the future

The practical influence of longtermist thinking is concentrated in a small network of philosophers, technologists and philanthropists based in Oxford and San Francisco. This community goes beyond theorising about the distant future and actively shapes institutions to govern it.

Fig. 4: The guardians of the future are conveniently the economic elite of the present (Image: Alex Kotliarskyi)

Émile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru offer an incisive characterisation of this network. In a recent paper, they argue that longtermism is in fact the apex of a bundle of overlapping ideologies, which they term TESCREAL: transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism, rationalism, effective altruism and longtermism. These schools share a common structure: they deploy speculative futures, including civilisational extinction narratives, to justify technology and governance arrangements that concentrate power and sideline present human welfare.[18] On this account, longtermism is an ideological formation more than a philosophical position, one that, by inflating the stakes of the far future to astronomical proportions, justifies almost any present-day sacrifice. Major AI companies – particularly those based in the US – sit at the intersection of these debates. Take Anthropic, the AI company founded by former members of OpenAI. By the standards of AI companies and at the time of writing, Anthropic enjoys a reputation for responsible development. Its stated mission is to ensure that the world safely navigates the transition through transformative AI, framed explicitly in terms of long-run civilisational stakes. The company has published detailed specifications for the values and behaviour of its AI model Claude, known as Claude’s Constitution.[19] The primary author is Amanda Askell, whose philosophical work on longtermism is among the most rigorous and self-critical in that tradition and whose arguments provide some of the most powerful objections to longtermist overreach. That Askell herself is uncertain whether her work constitutes an attack on or a defence of longtermism is telling: it reflects a genuine intellectual honesty rather than a programmatic commitment.[20] Moreover, dedicated effective altruists and longtermists such as William MacAskill and Owen Cotton-Barratt ‘gave detailed feedback or discussion’ on Claude’s Constitution.[21] The resulting document contains recognisably longtermist elements, like the priority assigned to avoiding catastrophic and irreversible outcomes and framing safe AI development as among humanity’s most consequential tasks, but it lacks an equally elaborated counterweight. Also conspicuously absent from Claude’s Constitution is an account of the wellbeing of present people that could morally anchor those long-term priorities. Without such an anchor, the longtermist elements simply elide present-oriented values. The asymmetry is more structural than intentional: catastrophic future risk is named, theorised and operationalised; the claims of those suffering now are not given equivalent weight or conceptual elaboration. This matters because the connection longtermism asserts between present action and distant futures is beyond validation. When the justification for overriding present concerns rests on speculation, the absence of a present-oriented counterweight in the governance of a popular AI system is a gap through which the temporal dis:connectivity at the heart of longtermist reasoning passes, quietly, from philosophical puzzle into practical governance. Whose present interests might be discounted in favour of whose imagined futures? The mosquito-net donor and the child who would have died of malaria are, in this calculus, almost worthless. The AI safety researcher speculating about trillion-person futures is, by the same logic, among the most important humans ever. The asymmetry is not a side effect. It is the point. And it is, on reflection, morally absurd. Hari Seldon’s equations worked because Asimov declared it so. In the real world, the future resists calculation. Rather than a counsel of despair, this is a reason to attend with urgency to the people and the problems in the here and now. 
[Published 23.6.2026 
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.
For the previous entry in this series on temporal dis:connectivity, click here. To read the introduction to the series, click here.]
[1] Hilary Greaves and William MacAskill, 'The Case for Strong Longtermism', in Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, ed. Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). [2] Nick Bostrom, 'Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority', Global Policy 4, 1 (2013): 19 https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12002. [3] There is an axiological as well as a deontic strand of longtermism. The former claims that in the most important decisions we face today, the effects on the far future are the most important determinant of the value of our options. The latter says that we ought to choose options that are best for the far future. For the sake of comprehensibility, I conflate the two in this piece. [4] Greaves and MacAskill, 'The Case for Strong Longtermism'. [5] Nick Bostrom, 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis', Global Policy 10, no. 4 (2019): 18 https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12718. [6] Bostrom, 'Existential Risk Prevention'. [7] Bostrom, 'Existential Risk Prevention', 19. [8] Isaac Asimov, Foundation (New York: Gnome Press, 1951). [9] Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer, 'Introduction', in Dis:connectivity and Globalisation: Concepts, Terms, Practices, ed. Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci, and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025). [10] Amanda Askell and Sven Neth, 'Longtermist Myopia', in Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, ed. Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett, and David Thorstad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). [11] David Thorstad, 'High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation', Philosophy & Public Affairs 51, no. 4 (2023) https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12248. [12] Nick Bostrom, 'Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards', Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1 (2002): 4. [13] Nick Beckstead, 'On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future' (PhD Dissertation, Rutgers, 2013), 11; Bostrom, 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis'. [14] Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (New York: Hachette Books, 2020), 18. [15] Bostrom, 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis'. [16] Elizabeth Hupfer, 'From Bednets to Rocket Ships: Efficiency in the Long-Term and Neglect for the Present', Journal of Applied Philosophy 42, no. 2 (2025): 1193 https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70014. [17] Alex McLaughlin, 'Visionaries and Crackpots, Maniacs and Saints: Existential Risk and the Politics of Longtermism', Ratio: An international journal of analytic philosophy 38, no. 4 (2025): 273 https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12449. [18] Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres, 'The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence', First Monday 29, no. 4 (2024) https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636. [19] Anthropic, 'Claude's Constitution: Our vision for Claude's character', 2025, accessed 25 March 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/constitution. [20] Askell and Neth, 'Longtermist Myopia', 296. [21] Anthropic, 'Claude's Constitution'.

bibliography

'Claude's Constitution: Our vision for Claude's character'. 2025, accessed 25 March 2026, https://www.anthropic.com/constitution. Asimov, Isaac. Foundation. New York: Gnome Press, 1951. Askell, Amanda and Sven Neth. 'Longtermist Myopia'. In Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, edited by Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett and David Thorstad,  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. Balme, Christopher, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer. 'Introduction'. In Dis:connectivity and Globalisation: Concepts, Terms, Practices, edited by Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer,  Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025. Beckstead, Nick. 'On the Overwhelming Importance of Shaping the Far Future'. PhD Dissertation, Rutgers, 2013. Bostrom, Nick. 'Existential Risk Prevention as Global Priority'. Global Policy 4, 1 (2013): 15-31. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12002. ———. 'Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards'. Journal of Evolution and Technology 9, no. 1 (2002). ———. 'The Vulnerable World Hypothesis'. Global Policy 10, no. 4 (2019): 455-76. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12718. Gebru, Timnit and Émile Torres. 'The TESCREAL bundle: Eugenics and the promise of utopia through artificial general intelligence'. First Monday 29, no. 4 (2024). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13636. Greaves, Hilary and William MacAskill. 'The Case for Strong Longtermism'. In Essays on Longtermism: Present Action for the Distant Future, edited by Hilary Greaves, Jacob Barrett and David Thorstad,  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025. Hupfer, Elizabeth. 'From Bednets to Rocket Ships: Efficiency in the Long-Term and Neglect for the Present'. Journal of Applied Philosophy 42, no. 2 (2025): 1190-209. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/japp.70014. McLaughlin, Alex. 'Visionaries and Crackpots, Maniacs and Saints: Existential Risk and the Politics of Longtermism'. Ratio: An international journal of analytic philosophy 38, no. 4 (2025): 268-78. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/rati.12449. Ord, Toby. The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. New York: Hachette Books, 2020. Thorstad, David. 'High Risk, Low Reward: A Challenge to the Astronomical Value of Existential Risk Mitigation'. Philosophy & Public Affairs 51, no. 4 (2023): 373-412. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12248. Continue Reading
23 June 2026
In Blog, Temporalities-Blog

Chronometric dynamite. Bones and fossils between temporal disruption and epistemological dis:connection

sina steglich
[Summary: Learn how the discovery of fossils and ancient bones shattered Christian chronology in the 19th century, forcing geologists, theologians and historians to forge new narratives of time, extinction and the origins of humanity.]
No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race, —whether or no  we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or ‘diluvium’, to prove former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia.[1]
With these words, British geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) began his book The Antiquity of Man in 1863. Looking for the antiquity of man, Lyell was interested in the origins of human life on Earth. The problem had become increasingly urgent for him and his contemporaries since the discovery of human and non-human remains in caves and rock strata. Scientific discoveries and attempts to date and interpret them were coming into competition and conflict with the answers that Christian cosmology had long taken for granted. New origin stories had to respond to these findings.

Origin stories…

Origin stories are human coping mechanisms. Not only dating origins but also narrating them and thereby imbuing them with meaning are effective remedies against the overwhelming implacability of contingency. Those who sought to tame chance could always fall back on meaning through origin. In Judeo-Christian cosmology, this origin story is Genesis. Elaborated in the Old Testament with kinship relations, the age of the world and of humanity could be traced back genealogically to the progenitors Adam and Eve. According to the calculations of the Irish archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656), Creation could be dated to 23 October 4004 B.C. This ‘Ussher chronology’ relied solely on biblical passages, substantiating their validity with regard to Genesis as the record of Creation. But this cosmology began crack when one considered the world beyond scripture and the evidence of observation. What if the world itself were to object to the narrative of its own origins?

… as Thanatos stories

This is precisely what happened to the early geologists of the 18th century, who interpreted rock layers as chronologically stratified sedimentary deposits and, through their calculations, not only pushed back the age of the Earth but also applied entirely different time scales from those suggested by the Bible. As a result, the roughly 6000 years of the Christian narrative were no longer sufficient, so this cosmology required correction. The discovery of older fossils and bones was no less than a temporal disruption of the Christian chronological order.[2] Beyond the question of origins, the more important issue, however, was that these rock layers contained evidence pointing to prior life. Prior life, that is, not pertaining to individuals but to the entire species. And that, in turn, was the real challenge for anyone raised in the Christian faith: death could not be conceived of solely in individual terms, but had to be applied to entire species in the form of extinction. Fossils pointed to a history of death and told not stories of life, but stories of death.[3] The  problem cut far deeper than merely dating: how could the extinction of species be reconciled with the Christian conception of Creation, in which everything was already in place and which, at most, was perpetually approaching perfection.

Expanding scales, shifting grounds

This problem bore twin children. First, this challenge intensified the more precisely geologists and palaeontologists defined Earth’s geological and biological history through their dating of rocks, fossils and bones. The constant correction and extension of the scales not only pushed back the assumed origin ever further back into the past but also required an ever finer division of time into geological periods and epochs.

Earth strata according to Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences, 7.

Such a provisionally defined origin, once set in motion and continuously adjusted, could hardly provide any relief. It was not a reliable foundation, but a shifting ground. Second, an abundance of empirical evidence, including relics of prior life that no longer had any surviving counterpart, constituted proof of the unthinkable: God gave life to creatures only to let them die out. This increasingly challenged the idea of perfectibility and thereby undermined a cosmology derived from the Bible or intended to be reconciled with it. But once discovered, the fossils and bones of extinct species remained in the world. They could not be denied as material evidence.[4] Consequently, it was not enough to merely extend the age of the world and adjust the geological time scale. Rather, Christian cosmology needed a narrative that took these findings into account.

Various forms of mechanism to strengthen ammonites, according to Buckland, The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation. Treatise VI, Vol. II: Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology, (London: William Pickering), plate 37.

(Missing) evidence: marginalisation strategies

One strategy was offered by the Scottish Catholic theologian Alexander Geddes (1737–1802) who explained in the preface to his Bible translation in a manner that was as pragmatic as it was explosive: ‘The writer does not amuse or tire his reader with long metaphysical discussions, about the nature of the universe, the generation of matter, cause and effect, time and eternity, and other such subtile and insolvable questions’, only to state, without further ado, that the ‘planet, called Earth, [may] have rolled in its little orbit for millions and millions of years; and have undergone […] millions of revolutions; before it was made the habitation of man’.[5] First, he refused to engage with the discussion of the origin of the world by framing it as an unsolvable problem, only to go on to admit that, in any case, one must assume it was several million years old and that humans had arrived and settled there only later. This theory did not quite fit with Genesis, a translation of which followed on the subsequent pages. Although this was an inconsistent and provocative twist, Geddes had taken a stance on the contemporary debates and responded to them. He attempted to integrate the issue while simultaneously marginalising it. Some years later, the German naturalist and physician Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert (1780–1860) stumbled across the same problem and came up with his own marginalisation. In his work Views from the Dark Side of Science (Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft, 1808), he tried to reconcile the fossils with the parallel existence of human life: ‘But even if there were […] no human remains to be found at all, that would still not be sufficient to prove that there were none at all at that time’.[6] His explanation for the lack of physical remains of humans was simple, yet difficult to refute: ‘In addition to this, the greater fragility of the human body — a quality that distinguishes humans from all larger animals — may also have prevented the remains of those ancient peoples from being discovered by later explorers’.[7] He considered them as more ephemeral and reversed the burden of proof: not missing testimonies were proof of the non-existence of man, rather their existence had to be assumed because the opposite could not be verified. Seen this way, the narrative of the Bible could hold true, because fossils and other creatures’ bones simply did not reveal the entire past.[8] Fossils and bones required that Creation be redated, but man could have been there from the very beginning. For the time being, Genesis was rescued.

From new narratives to new epistemologies: separating history from its ‘pre-'

But these strategies never solved the conundrum because they only concealed the underlying questions and were unable to resolve the epistemological core of the problem: the contradiction between Christian concepts of time and material evidence provided. Eyewitness accounts remained in conflict with faith. And faith was thus shaken. New narratives based on a different interpretation of the findings were therefore necessary cope. One such a strategy was separating human history from the history of the Earth. In the course of ‘inventing’ prehistory, sources from the past were strictly divided into those of human origin, namely, written records and ‘natural’ ones.[9] Thus, the understanding of the general historicity (of man) became disconnected from that of the Earth and all things natural.

August Ludwig von Schlözer limiting history to planet Earth and ‘recorded events’ by excluding the ‘archives of Saturn and Sirius’. von Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie, (Göttingen: Johann Christian Dietrich).

This separation was further solidified as a disciplinary distinction in the course of professionalisation and scientification during the 19th century. From then on, there was the history without a prefix, exclusively referring to humans who left written traces, and many siblings with prefixes, such as ‘natural-‘, ‘pre-‘ and ‘early-‘.[10] The latter was the province of research into bones, fossils, cave paintings and archaeological finds, which were not to be read but excavated. This disciplinary distinction based on source types mitigated the temporal disruption. In this interpretation, humans were no longer de-centred as latecomers by the fossils; rather, the exact opposite occurred: the fossils were excluded as prehistory from ‘proper’ history and relegated to a preliminary phase. However, effacing the temporal disruption gave rise to an epistemological disconnection, producing immense path dependencies.[11] For by restricting history to written history, it diachronically excluded everything that came before, for which there was no written record, and synchronically everything beyond the world of the written word, especially in regions beyond Europe and its expanding colonial spheres of influence. Our current effort to break up and diversify the monolith of history and to incorporate sources other than written records, such as oral history and material culture, into our understanding of the past is also a consequence of the disciplinary specialisation that necessarily resulted from the confrontation with fossils and bones around 1800 and the expanded timescales they required. Fossils and bones are chronometric dynamite first because they disrupted the Christian temporal order, which was bleeding plausibility. In a more fundamental sense, their evidence lit the fuse that eventually blasted the fissure between written history and its marginalised preliminary stages. As a result, anything that did not conform to this exclusive understanding of history was excluded from historical time. Africa as the continent without history is the most prominent stereotype of this epistemological closure. Engaging with these early geologists’, palaeontologists’, theologians’ and historians’ attempts to make sense of excavated traces of past lives, therefore, is not only of interest to historians of science. Every historian would do well to reflect on the fundamentals of the discipline and see its epistemological constraints not only as a Eurocentristic pitfall to be criticised and rejected, but as a coping mechanism of our disciplinary predecessors around 1800. Historicising this mechanism as a breach in modern historiography could initiate a deeper discussion of the discipline’s own stories of origin.[12] 
[Published 26.5.2026
temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.
Find the introduction here and the previous post here.]
[1] Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation (London: John Murray, 1863), 1. [2] See Peter J. Bowler, Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Science History Publications, 1976); Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology (New York: Science History Publications, 1976). [3] On Thanatos (hi)stories, see Peter Schnyder, 'Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens', in Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, ed. Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards, and Maximilian Bergengruen (Freiburg: Rombach, 2012), 119. [4] See David Schulz, Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020), 58. [5] Alexander Geddes, The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. (London: J. Davis, 1792), ii. Emphasis in original. [6] Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft (Dresden: Arnold, 1808), 214. Author’s translation. [7] Schubert, Ansichten von der Nachtseite. [8] See Lena Kugler, 'Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit', in Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michael Bies, Sean Franzel, and Dirk Oschmann (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017). [9] See Stefanos Geroulanos, The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins (New York: Liveright, 2024). [10] See Sina Steglich, 'Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das "Prä-" vor die Geschichte kam', Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022) https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003; Martin Deuerlein, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah, 'Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der 'Tiefenzeit'', Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025). [11] See David Černin, 'Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory', in The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, ed. Aviezer Tucker and David Černin (London: Bloomsbury, 2025). [12] See Marianne Sommer, 'Experimenting with Bones', in Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, ed. Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis (Boston: Brill, 2016).
bibliography
Bowler, Peter J. Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Buckland, William. The Bridgewater Treatises on the Power Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in Creation. Treatise VI, Vol. II: Geology and Mineralogy considered with Reference to Natural Theology. London: William Pickering, 1837. Černin, David. 'Epistemic and ontological divide between human history and prehistory'. In The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Philosophy of the Historical Sciences and Big History, edited by Aviezer Tucker and David Černin,  London: Bloomsbury, 2025. Deuerlein, Martin, Johannes Großmann and Mira Shah. 'Unsichere Urgeschichte. Fragiles Wissen und die Hervorbringung der 'Tiefenzeit''. Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 76, no. 1-2 (2025): 5-10. Geddes, Alexander. The Holy Bible, or the Books Accounted Sacred by Jews and Christians; otherwise Called the Books oft he Old and New Convenants: Faithfully Translated from Corrected Texts oft he Originals. With Various Readings, Explanatory Notes and Critical Remarks. Vol. I. London: J. Davis, 1792. Geroulanos, Stefanos. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. New York: Liveright, 2024. Kugler, Lena. 'Staub und Steine. Organische Überreste und die Tiefenzeit moderner Flüchtig- und Vergänglichkeit'. In Flüchtigkeit der Moderne. Eigenzeiten des Ephemeren im langen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Michael Bies, Sean Franzel and Dirk Oschmann,  Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2017. Lyell, Charles. The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man with Remarks on Theories of the Origin of Species by Variation. London: John Murray, 1863. Rudwick, Martin J. S. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology. New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Schnyder, Peter. 'Paläopoetologie. Zur Emergenz der Urgeschichte des Lebens'. In Die biologische Vorgeschichte des Menschen. Zu einem Schnittpunkt von Erzählordnung und Wissensformation, edited by Johannes Lehmann, Roland Borgards and Maximilian Bergengruen,  Freiburg: Rombach, 2012. Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich. Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaft. Dresden: Arnold, 1808. Schulz, David. Die Natur der Geschichte: Die Entdeckung der geologischen Tiefenzeit und die Geschichtskonzeptionen zwischen Aufklärung und Moderne. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020. Sommer, Marianne. 'Experimenting with Bones'. In Narrating Life – Experiments with Human and Animal Bodies in Literature, Science and Art, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Elisabeth Friis,  Boston: Brill, 2016. Steglich, Sina. 'Vom Ausgang der Erde aus der Welt des Menschen. Oder: Wie das "Prä-" vor die Geschichte kam'. Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift Sonderheft 5 (2022): 26-38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.2478/kwg-2022-0003. von Schlözer, August Ludwig. Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie. Göttingen: Johann Christian Dietrich, 1772. Continue Reading
26 May 2026
In Blog, Temporalities-Blog, Voices Blog

Nonlinear and counterintuitive: the timeline of fashion(s)

aliena guggenberger
[Summary: Explore how fashion's nonlinear relationship with time — from fast-fashion's daily drops to the cyclical revival of historical styles — reveals the shifting temporalities of our modern era.]
     

Fig 1: A springlike interpretation of autumn/winter 2026 at Dior / Dior © Giovanni Giannoni/WWD, Dior Fall 2026 Ready-to-Wear Collection [PHOTO]

  As temperatures rise, social life shifts toward the promise of summer. Yet, from spring onwards, autumn/winter collections with coats and knitwear are already on display in department stores and online shops. During Paris Fashion Week (autumn/winter 2026) at the beginning of March, Jonathan Anderson showcased a surprisingly summery vision of winter fashion with flowers on short dresses for Dior, presented en plein air in the Tuileries Garden.   What feels like a seasonal mismatch is in fact a symptom of changing temporalities in the fashion industry and its counterintuitive logic. The traditional two-season model has expanded into a near-continuous cycle of drops and micro-collections. Many department stores refresh core assortments every six to eight weeks, while fast-fashion retailers such as Zara and H&M introduce new items weekly. At the extreme end of this spectrum, ultra-fast fashion platforms like Shein update their inventories daily, adding hundreds to thousands of new items every single day.

Fig 2: Ultra-fast fashion brands drop thousands of new items daily / screenshot AG

Fashion, in this sense, no longer mirrors the present season; its mission is to anticipate the next, operating on a timeline increasingly disconnected from (climatic) reality and structuring consumer desire around a future that has not yet arrived. But how is that pace even possible?

Reuse, rearticulate and recycle

The acceleration of the fashion system and the maintenance of a fully packed fashion calendar, with pre-collections and interim drops, are possible as business models only because they rely structurally on reuse. Here, ‘reuse’ does not refer to the eco-friendly repurposing of existing items, but to the continual reactivation of existing designs, silhouettes and aesthetic codes in newly produced clothes. In some cases, contemporary designers deliberately draw on historical references and the established house codes of brands like Balenciaga, Chanel or Dior, creating collections that both acknowledge the past and meet the audience’s expectation for continuity and recognisable brand identity. Building on growing consumer fascination with fashion archives as connecting tools between past and present, brands are starting to unlock their heritage to deepen the narratives behind the clothes. In February, Maison Margiela launched Folders, a project consisting of a publicly accessible cloud drive as an evolving archive that shares an exploration of both physical and digital materials from the house’s history, dating back to its founding in 1988.

Fig 3: In the exhibition ‘Fashion and Time’ (Metropolitan Museum), garments from different periods conversed across time / both: © Metropolitan Museum, Nicholas Alan Cope (Selected Images | The Metropolitan Museum of Art); (Left) Gabrielle Chanel Suit, spring/summer 1963 haute couture. Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009, Gift of Jane Holzer, 1977 (2009.300.525a–c) / Karl Lagerfeld for House of Chanel, spring/summer 1994. Courtesy of CHANEL Patrimoine Collection, Paris // (Right) Mrs. Arnold, Dinner dress, ca. 1895, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Sally Ingalls, 1932 (2009.300.643a, b) / Comme des Garçons, ensemble, fall/winter 2004–5. Gift of Comme des Garçons, 2020.

Fashion does not merely produce novelty; it reorganises what already exists, which is clearly visible in the current resurgence of Y2K fashion, where key pieces of the early-2000s such as the crop top and low-rise jeans have re-entered contemporary wardrobes. As the example of the corset illustrates, even seemingly obsolete garments and styles are experiencing comebacks. Once dismissed as a relic of the Victorian era and nearly abandoned by the 1920s, the corset was revived in the 18th-century-inspired creations of Vivienne Westwood and more recently through the fascination with costume aesthetics fuelled by historical films and series. What was formerly underwear, once criticised for deforming the female body, has been transformed into outerwear embedded in red-carpet styles and everyday youth fashion, recoding its affective meaning from constraint to empowerment.

Fig. 4: Corset, 1876, Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia (Costume Institute)

 

Walter Benjamin and the tiger’s leap

Walter Benjamin had already observed in the 1930s, when Paris couturiers returned to the styles of la belle époque, that fashion proceeds nonlinearly: ‘The stream gradient of every fashion current… originates from what is forgotten (Jede Strömung der Mode … hat ihr Gefälle vom Vergessen her)’.[1] As Philipp Ekardt points out in his book Benjamin on Fashion, the most focused treatment of the subject can be found in Benjamin’s Arcades Project (Passagenwerk), where he draws partly on the theoretical reflections of the sociologist Georg Simmel and fashion critic Helen Grund (1886–1982).[2] Ekardt shows that, for Benjamin, fashion is not merely a symptom of modern capitalism but a cultural ‘chronotechnology’ that structures historical time by repeatedly reactivating elements of the past within the present. The concept of the tiger’s leap in Walter Benjamin’s thought originally served to describe a sudden, dialectical moment in history in which the past is violently seized and made present. In the context of fashion, this metaphor helps to understand the rearticulation of what has gone out of style. Extending the idea of the leap as an almost violent seizure of the past can be read not only in terms of time but also in relation to space and globalisation. Innovation in fashion often emerges through acts of appropriation that draw not just on earlier moments in history but on forms from other cultures, allowing something new to appear under the guise of what already exists.

Historical reflections and timeless dresses

Looking at fashion history reveals recurring patterns that are often mistakenly seen as uniquely modern, such as the slow-fashion movement as a reaction to fast fashion. Over a hundred years ago, contemporaries were already criticising the rapid pace of the ready-to-wear industry and the perceived ‘haste’ of fashion change. In the years preceding the First World War, several designers and artists associated with the reform dress movement endeavoured to establish timelessness as a guiding principle in women’s fashion. This ideal found expression in loose, simple silhouettes and a deliberate reference to classical antiquity, as seen in designs of Hedwig Buschmann, Madeleine Vionnet and the Delphi Dress of Henriette and Mariano Fortuny. The aim was to create more practical garments that contrasted with the restrictive and expensive, ever-changing couture wardrobe.

Fig 5:(left) Hedwig Buschmann’s Neue Frauentracht, 1910; (right) Clarisse Coudert wearing a Delphi Dress, 1917 // AG / Public Domain Conde nast fortuny - Delphos gown - Wikipedia

The logics of fashion — the pursuit of novelty for novelty’s sake and the cyclical recurrence of stylistic forms — were seen as symptomatic of a fast-moving modernity then as now. However, the very perception of speed must be assessed differently in a pre-digital age. In this context, Georg Simmel argued in 1905 that the faster fashions change, the more it reflects the nervousness of the era: ‘Changes in fashion reveal how nerves can be dulled to stimuli. As an age becomes more nervous, the more quickly its fashions change’.[3] This inevitably raises the question: how nervous is our own era?

Changing catwalks

After the collapse of the European and North American financial markets in 1929, the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture reduced the size of its members’ collections from approximately 400 to 100 designs. This enforced rarefaction of haute couture consolidated what has since become a defining marketing paradigm: the production of extraordinarily costly, highly exclusive garments accessible only to a narrow elite. It thus stands in stark contrast to the fast-fashion industry above, whose logic is predicated on mass production, accelerated turnover and broad consumer accessibility. While the expansion in the fast-fashion product lines and compression of their product cycles has led to a much broader range of items to be presented, the fashion shows themselves are growing ever shorter and more condensed, lasting barely 10 minutes. It is not the mass of garments, but the pace of the industry that has been transferred to the shows. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this accelerated rhythm was briefly interrupted: lockdowns and travel restrictions forced the industry into a moment of deceleration, as shows were postponed, cancelled or shifted to remote formats. Yet this disruption remained temporary and the fashion calendar soon returned to its familiar fast-paced rhythm after the pandemic.
‘The design is a wish or a curse that casts the garment and its wearer in a time warp through historical periods, like a sudden tumble through the sediment of an archaeological dig’. Hussein Chalayan in the show notes to Medea (Spring/Summer 2002)
One of the designers that invoked time most intensively in his early collections is Hussein Chalayan, framing them in themes of memory and future archaeology (e.g. 1993: the tangent flows). In his show One Hundred and Eleven (2007), garments mechanically transform on the runway before the audience’s eyes, successively revealing silhouettes from different decades. The fluidity of time was represented by an enormous clock in the background which, like a time machine, functions as a double image in fashion, signifying both compulsory change and the fluid, relentless time of its own history.[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjnuHmxRbxI&t=642s The nonlinearity — or even anti-linearity — of fashion is also reflected in spatiality. The traditionally linear catwalk has increasingly been dissolved and deconstructed in 21st-century scenography. A striking example is OMA/AMO’s Cube Field set design for Prada Menswear (spring/summer 2012) at the Fondazione Prada, designed by Rem Koolhaas, where the audience was arranged in a grid, abolishing the primacy of the front row.

Conclusion: continuities

If fashion history appears fragmented, it is only because we tend to read it linearly. Seen through the lens of nonlinear temporality, the reappearance of silhouettes, materials and stylistic gestures is not an anomaly but an enduring principle. The exhibition Fashion and Time at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2020) captured this dynamic by drawing on Henri Bergson’s concept of la durée. Supported by a dynamic exhibition design by visual artist Es Devlin, who shaped the galleries into vast clock faces, each marking 60 ‘minutes’ of fashion, the exhibition stages a series of curatorial flashbacks that allow garments from different periods to converse across time (see the images above). The pace of fashion makes it virtually impossible to be keep up and be fashionable. But as Elena Esposito puts it, the constant turnover produces a paradoxical stability.[5] Precisely because trends are known to be short-lived, they function as reliable temporal markers. Fashion thus structures social time through cycles of anticipation, novelty and obsolescence, revealing how modern societies organise themselves around shifting yet patterned timelines. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7B-xr346JU&t=18s 
[Published 23.6.2026 

temporal dis:connectivity is a blog series that explores how concepts and experiences of time shape global processes across time and space. In this series, scholars from different disciplines ask what attention to temporality can reveal about globalisation, historical change, and the ways societies imagine the past, present, and future.

This is the first post in the blog series on temporalities that Susanne Quitmann introduced yesterday.]
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999). [2] Philipp Ekart, Benjamin on Fashion (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), AP 393, lines 496-97. [3]  Georg Simmel, Philosophie der Mode, ed. Hans Landsberg, Moderne Zeitfragen, (Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905), 11. Author’s translation. [4] Allessandra Vaccari, 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy', ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009). [5] Elena Esposito, Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004).
bibliography
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, USA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Ekart, Philipp. Benjamin on Fashion. London: Bloomsbury, 2020. Esposito, Elena. Die Verbindlichkeit des Vorübergehenden. Paradoxien der Mode. Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2004. Simmel, Georg. Philosophie der Mode. Moderne Zeitfragen. Edited by Hans Landsberg. Berlin: Pan-Verlag, 1905. Vaccari, Allessandra. 'Hussein Chalayan. Morphing the Centruy'. ZoneModa Journal 1, no. 1 (2009): 12-19. Continue Reading
28 April 2026
In Blog, Temporalities-Blog

temporal dis:connectivity: a new blog series

susanne quitmann
This series of blog posts explores how time – both as an idea and as a lived experience – has shaped our global world. Bringing together scholars from various disciplines, it examines what happens when global connections are delayed or rushed, and how societies have understood and organised time in a modern, increasingly interconnected world. By focusing on these shifting rhythms and perceptions, we’re exploring what they reveal about the nature of both globalisation and about time itself. Globalisation is often described in simple terms: either the world is becoming more connected, or it is pulling apart. The concept of global dis:connectivity, developed at gd:c, challenges this binary view. It argues that connection and disconnection are not opposites but exist side by side and constantly shape one another. Interruptions, resistances, absences and detours are not exceptions to globalisation; they are a central part of globalisation. We often become most aware of our interconnectedness when it falters: wars, economic crises, pandemics and supply chain disruptions remind us how deeply entangled our lives are. Even nationalist or isolationist movements, which appear to reject globalisation, operate through international networks, revealing the paradoxes at the heart of our global age. Temporalities is one of three research focusses at gd:c. Much research on globalisation has focused on space. As a case in point, the three previous research focusses at gd:c were disruptions, absences and detours. However, those are not only spatial phenomena; they are temporal too. They involve pauses, delays and acceleration. Historians and scholars from other fields have increasingly turned their attention to how societies understand and experience time. Particularly over the past two decades, research has shown that time is not simply a neutral backdrop to events. It is shaped by culture, politics, technology and power. As early as the 1970s and 1980s, thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck argued that modern societies developed a new sense of historical time, one in which the future was no longer seen as predetermined but open and fundamentally different from the past. Stephen Jay Gould, in his reflections on geological time, explored how cultural narratives shape our understanding time and history. His work continues to influence debates about the Anthropocene and Big History, which stretch our sense of both time and space.  

Jess-Hans Martens, Ship’s clock (Schiffsuhr), Freiburg im Breisgau, c.1865, Deutsches Uhrenmuseum, Furtwangen (2006-131). CC BY-SA.

In the modern era, experiences of and ideas about time were closely tied to globalisation. Steamships, railways and the telegraph seemed to shrink space and time, bridging geographical distances and accelerating life. Migrants and traders experienced both rapid movement and prolonged waiting. The introduction of Greenwich Mean Time as an international standard in 1884 created a shared global reference point for communication and commerce, even as it divided the world into time zones and met significant resistance.

The World Time Zone Chart, 1921, from the Ministry of Transport, Maritime Transport Division’s Search and Rescue charts of New Zealand and the Pacific, Archives New Zealand (ABPV W3111 Box 4/ 63),. CC BY 2.0.

Global time zones necessitated precise technology to quantify time objectively. Such technology spread around the world, but Sebastian Conrad has shown that they could also be adapted to fit local customs of timekeeping.[1] Time was a political tool as well. European powers used temporal terms to justify colonial domination, casting non-Western societies into what Dipesh Chakrabarty memorably calls the ‘imaginary waiting room of history’.[2] This blog series invites readers to rethink globalisation and global history through the lens of time. By focusing on interruptions, accelerations, time keeping and competing temporalities, we explore how attention to time can transform our understanding of global processes, past and present, and our understanding of history itself. 
[Editor's note: Published 27.4.2026. Click here for the next post in the series]
[1] Sebastian Conrad, '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century', Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821n doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391. [2] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 8.
bibliography
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe. Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Conrad, Sebastian. '"Nothing is the Way it Should Be": Global Transformations of the Time Regime in the Nineteenth Century'. Modern Intellectural History 15, no. 3 (2018): 821-48. https://doi.org/doi:10.1017/S1479244316000391.   Continue Reading
27 April 2026