This design by Project Project for this year’s Whitney Biennial catalog combines several things I like: the Whitney Biennial, time-travel, and infinity. This spread also features the year of my birth…
Henry Louis Gates Jr. on how technology enables a kind of time travel.
I’d go forward about 200,000 years to see if we’d survived that long and, if so, what people were up to. Of course, I might have some trouble communicating with humans in the future, because I wouldn’t expect to find anyone speaking English…
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J. Richard Gott on to when, given the opportunity, he would travel in time. When asked why, he replied:
Because that’s how long homo sapiens have been around. I’ve done some thinking about time not just in terms of travel or physics, but in relation to how long things last—things like the Berlin Wall or Broadway plays or the human species. In 1993, I published a paper inNature that applied one of the most famous postulates in science, the Copernican principle, to time.
The Copernican principle is simply the idea that your location in the universe is not special. Most likely your last name falls somewhere in the middle ninety-five percent of the phone book, not right at the beginning or the end, which would be special. And most likely you’re living sometime in the middle ninety-five percent of the length of the human species. Otherwise you’d be in a special position and that’s just less likely.
Using some simple math, I predicted with ninety-five percent confidence that the human race would last at least another 5,100 years, but less than 7.8 million years. Now, that’s a wide range, but an important one. The fate of our own species is supremely important to us. Some people predict we’ll die out in the next hundred years if we aren’t careful; others think we’ll just last indefinitely. Neither is likely. In any case, we’d better not be complacent. The Earth is littered with the bones of extinct species…
My estimates of the future longevity of the human species are based entirely on our past longevity as an intelligent species—the only one we know—and make no assumptions that our fate will be similar to that for other species. However, my estimates give us a total longevity (past plus future) quite comparable to that observed for other mammal species, whose average longevity is 2 million years.
Why the coincidence? Well, if we remain confined to Earth, we are subject to the things that routinely cause other mammal species to go extinct. That’s why I am so concerned about the space program. So far, the space program is very brief, and the Copernican principle predicts it will probably go out of business sooner rather than later. And clearly we would increase our chances of surviving if we colonize space.
