People can barely picture the effects of climate change ten years out, let alone the many thousands of years over which Earth's systems unfold. The remedy is to widen what counts as the present, so that distant consequences feel like part of today's decisions. One way to do this is to imagine yourself as an ancestor of people living ten thousand or a hundred thousand years from now.
Two crises feed each other: humans are reshaping the planet's environment, while experts are publicly mocked and their institutions are worn down. Wearing down expert authority makes the environmental damage worse, because the people best equipped to see slow, long-range dangers are the ones being ignored. Listening to scientists who study spans of time far longer than a social media timeline is key to responding.
Disciplined long-range forecasting is not crystal-ball futurism. It works by finding patterns in data and building detailed scenarios and numerical models. This lets experts project ice ages, climate shifts and earthquakes tens of thousands to millions of years ahead, when they plan a nuclear waste store that must stay safe that long.
The way specialists reason about vast timescales is not a gift reserved for them. Ordinary people can build it as a skill, a kind of time literacy, through repeated mental exercises. Teaching it in schools could carry it into the wider culture.
A culture organized around short-term profit narrows the range of futures people can imagine. Deliberately exploring alternative timescales opens up options that look less gloomy and suggests ways out of ecological trouble. If a society can plan over hundreds of thousands of years for one project, the open question is whether it can apply that horizon to more of its decisions.